Chosen Solution
I recently acquired a macbook that was going to be thrown out. The macbook would boot occasionally, I determined that the cause of this was bad thermal paste. I opened it up and found my hypothesis to be correct. I replaced all three heatsinks by cleaning them with Isopropyl Alcohol 91% and Paper Towel. I used Thermaltake TG-7 from Best Buy to replace the compound, put everything back together, and attempted to boot it up. PROBLEM: When I try to boot up the device, The fans will pulse (turn off and on) as long as I hold down the power button. When I go to plug it into wall power, the fans do the same thing, but the rest of the device stays lifeless. Additional Notes: -I did not replace any components except the thermal paste -I did not use an anti-static wrist thingy -I attempted to reset the SMC , which turned off the fans but did nothing else -I cannot boot into: Recovery, Diagnostic, Single-User, etc. -The device was working before I operated on it -The Battery Indicator shows a full battery and my cheap multimeter shows around 12-13v -I plan on selling if I can get it to work, scrapping it if it doesn’t SMC Reset: -battery indicator on mac lights up 5 leds from left to right for 5 secs and then fades off -charging cable shows green -when performing smc reset, charging cable color does not change color (stays green) during and after the key combo is pressed.
Try this command. Shift-Option-Control-Power If I understand you correctly, a similar thing happened to my MacBook Pro(late 2013, no repairs but didn’t turn on) and this helped. Hope it works for you!
