Macbook Air 2008 won’t boot after error message asking to shut down due to low battery

batterybootmacbook pro

Yesterday my Macbook Air (original), model: a1237 flashed an error message
asking the user to shutdown due to low battery. Since it was not me, but my brother who was operating the macbook at that time, that I am not able to exactly put here what the error message was.

But, as I was told later, it prompted him to shutdown.

After that event, the Macbook when completely dead! It won't boot.

Here are the things that happen now, when I power it on:

  • sleep light turns on
  • keyboard lights are off
  • the Apple logo on the lid doesn't turn on
  • no chime, no sound, no display
  • the fan works

It's like as if only the sleep led and the fan are the two working components in the macbook.

Things I tried:

  • SMC reset
  • Removing the battery and trying to switch it on AC (Is this a bad practice?)

None of these tricks worked!

I would be very grateful to you if you could help me on this one.
Thank you in advance!

Best Answer

If you can't boot to a grey screen after resetting the SMC and then connecting a working charger for 15 minutes, you have a hardware issue.

The steps a hardware technician would perform are as follows:

  • Disconnect everything you can from the Mac
  • Try a power on when connected to power. (Observing whether the charge LED goes green or orange is an important clue to the health of the SMC/logic board and battery)
  • Reset the NVRAM and try a boot with the option key held down listening for the blower to start up
  • Charge for 10 minutes
  • Reset the SMC again
  • Now that things you can do externally are basically exhausted, now they would open the Mac case and proceed with observation/testing - perhaps with disconnect the battery and test charging and boot again
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