A student brought in a 13" Macbook Pro (unibody) with a "no boot" problem. The hard drive seemed fine, so I tried booting to our external diagnostic drive, using a IEEE 1384 (Firewire) 800 cable. The drive was on, and daisy-chained to another computer, but FireWire is (supposedly) hot-swappable, so...no problem, right?
Unfortunately, No So Much. The moment I hit the power button on the laptop, there was a flash and a puff of smoke from the FireWire port, and the latop shut down. I quickly pulled the FireWire cable and the Magsafe power cord. I stopped and thought it over. Did I do something stupid? Well, no, I think what I did should have been fine. So...I turned the laptop back on without the FireWire cable. It started up...fine....until milliseconds later SMOKE AND FLAMES shot out of the port!!!
I shut it down again. Looking at the FireWire port, it was charred and melted. The FireWire 800 cable also turned out to be melted.
So, sent it out to the depot for repair, they replaced the SATA cable (common failure in this model) and repaired the MoBo. I'm still not sure what happened with the FireWire port, it looked like the hot pin got shorted to ground, but I don't know why.
Google indicates that hot-swapping FireWire can be hazardous; I've never had a problem before.
P*S
Unfortunately, No So Much. The moment I hit the power button on the laptop, there was a flash and a puff of smoke from the FireWire port, and the latop shut down. I quickly pulled the FireWire cable and the Magsafe power cord. I stopped and thought it over. Did I do something stupid? Well, no, I think what I did should have been fine. So...I turned the laptop back on without the FireWire cable. It started up...fine....until milliseconds later SMOKE AND FLAMES shot out of the port!!!
I shut it down again. Looking at the FireWire port, it was charred and melted. The FireWire 800 cable also turned out to be melted.
So, sent it out to the depot for repair, they replaced the SATA cable (common failure in this model) and repaired the MoBo. I'm still not sure what happened with the FireWire port, it looked like the hot pin got shorted to ground, but I don't know why.
Google indicates that hot-swapping FireWire can be hazardous; I've never had a problem before.
P*S
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