Apple Mac Book pro A1286 - keyboard and battery not recognized after system rehabilitation

Last month a good friend of mine spilled an entire large cup of coffee on her 2 month old Macbook Pro 15" laptop. The system shut off and died. She was denied service from apple because liquid damage is not covered. I saw her last weekend and I offered to fix her computer for her.

I dismantled the entire computer, cleaned as much as I could in my 2 gallon ultrasonic cleaner.
I used a 50/50 solution of simple green and distilled water, preset to 150F
After 30 minutes of cleaning, I removed the board, and started going to town with it, cleaning everything with q-tips and 97% rubbing alcohol. Once every part was cleaned, (which took me all of three full days), I let it sit in a bath of direct heat from two 500watt lamps for 12 hours. When dry, I replaced a few surface mount resistors on the board which were fried, and I fixed the audio cable port which ripped off the board when dismantling the unit. After all of the soldering repairs were complete, I reassembled the computer and powered it on.

At first, the system worked perfectly. It powered on through the BIOS, started loading the operating system, and I began to enter the password. After entering the first 5 letters of the password, the keyboard became unresponsive. The backlight stayed on, and the power button no longer functioned.

I powered the computer off by removing the battery and the power adapter.
When I rebooted the machine, the keyboard failed to light up, and failed to be recognized.
I checked both the backlight and ribbon cable connections, both are clean and secure.
4.62V is shown at the backlight power ribbon.

The system battery is also not detected at this time. The battery status indicator flashes green 5 times and shuts off when pressed. The battery is getting power to charge, so there must be an internal short inside of the battery.

Anyhow, the system powers on automatically when the power cable is attached, regardless of the presence of the system battery. The power button does not work, and the keyboard does not work.

The system makes its noise and starts to load into the BIOS and then hangs indefinitely.

I have tried resetting the SMC and PRAM according to Apple's website, but neither work as the keyboard is not recognized.





Any ideas,

Thanks,
Chris

 

sounds like there is still something cooked on the mainboard. and this could be anything from the EFI EEPROM ( those things are notorious for going nuts after water damage ) to something in the overly complex power circuit. My husband has a lab and reflow station and still hates trying to run down issues on those boards.

those also had the Nvidia issue but sounds like it is not a GPU issue. if she spilled it towards the middle you may have " gunk " under the BGA chips. ( I killed a couple MBP 15" units that way and he found shorts after removing the CPU and GPU.


sadly best advice I can come up with is find a used motherboard Chris

 

Apple Keyboards are very sensitive to water damage, in my case i spilled a few drops of water on my macbook pro (less than a milliliter) and the keyboard dies, so maybe you need to swap the keyboard for a new one.

And for the battery, are you tried SMC Reset and PRAM Reset?

 

I think radiomist is right. The keyboard most likely needs to be replaced. Maybe the power button too.


Sent from my iPad 2 using Tapatalk.

 

Yes, and no.
A new keyboard fixed the fact that the other keyboard was broken, but the system still hanged on boot up.
I pressed Control and V to see what it was doing, sure enough the harddrive boot parameters were messed up.
I restarted and pressed Conrtol S, and then typed in fsck-fy and I was able to see that the drive had 14 minor errors and 2 major errors, all of which were not fixable.
I tried disc-warrior to no avail. I backed up her data on another system and I reinstalled Lion. The system works perfectly as it should.

The total repair costs were $62, and a few hours of my time. My cost was no where near the $1850 Apple quoted to fix her computer out of warranty. (Spills are not covered)

The battery has an internal short, so PRAM and SMC resets did nothing. A new battery is roughly $80, but she chose not to replace it.

Chris

 

Nice work!