I installed a system update on my MACBOOK PRO (15-INCH 2.4/2.2GHZ) this morning, and somewhere during the process the screen went black and the computer became unresponsive. I did a force restart and all I got was the startup sound, no chime, and no screen activity, just black. I think this means that the logic board has gone bad, but I would be glad to hear your ideas. Any ideas on how to get it going again? This happened once before on this computer, and I got it going again by doing a forced restart. Not this time. Anyone? Apple support suggests that this is a bad logic board.

And what happens when you plug in the external hard drive containing the bootable clone of whatever OS you were using prior to the "system update"?

Command +R… Recovery mode?

Try powering on with the Option key held down to see if you get to the drive selection interface. That's before the OS boots and can maybe narrow this down to a HW vs SW issue.

Not sure what Startup Sound is, which you say you get while also saying you get No Chime. Does it make a noise through the speakers or not?

Couple of other things to check are to see if the Caps Lock key will light the Caps Lock light, that will tell you if it's powered on or off.

Also try shining a flashlight through the Apple Logo on the back of the screen to see if there's anything on the screen and possibly a backlight failure.

But give the model and age, it's quite possible that you've gotten hit with the Nvidia GPU failure that all of those suffer from and Apple was repairing for free for several years.

Maybe he's getting the HD trying boot or the Mac checking the optical drive, when the power button is pushed, and not getting the subsequent start up chime, which I assume to be the actual Startup sound.

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