Macbook Pro died. Help!

My macbook pro died, and I will need them to replace it, almost certainly.

Here is the situation:

I was playing gears of war on the windows side, with my gpu moderately overclocked with atitool... I am guessing that the cause of the computer crashing (permanently) is that I burned out the gpu.

I am afraid that when I hand in my laptop to apple, and they do their diagnostics, they might try to transplant the hdd into a new machine and will see atitool running on the windows side and then decide not to give me a new machine.

This might not happen, or it might not even be an issue. They probably won't look through the windows side anyway, they are apple after all and don't offer any support for windows...

Just the same, I want to know what I can do to protect myself. Is there any way to access the hdd directly without taking the machine apart (and voiding the warranty), so that I could potentially get rid of atitool before bringing my machine into the store?

I have access to other apple laptop computers, etc. Times like these I wish I had a macbookesque removable hard drive... sigh...

Check the sig for my clocks, which, if/when I get my new machine, I will not be overclocking lol....

 

Wow that's terribly unfortunate. I've been overclocking my MBP 2.2Ghz's GPU to a steady 560/880, and noticed no problems, but now I'm scared to continue doing so!

Also the best I bet you could do, would be sending in the laptop to a certified computer technician (to avoid any warranty void) to transfer any data you have on that HD to another. I'm also guessing you'll actually have to take out the HD, unless there is some sort of firewire/usb device that allows transferring via hd's...

Lots of luck with the repair, and unless you set the laptop to auto-overclock on startup then there shouldn't be any problem.

 

I do have it set up for that, I have no idea why. In hindsight, it seems stupid.

Actually, I technically have it set up to underclock on startup. I set the 2d clocks lower than default and the plugged in 3d clocks high.

Still, they might notice.

Does anyone know if the apple diagnostic procedure involves going through your hard drive?

 

Do you have OS X set as the default partition? If you do I doubt they would even check if you have a partition.

 

transfer the HD to a external enclosure and plug it into any computer
and make the modifications on your hard drive

 

ok well it booted up randomly and i took care of business in case it dies again.

what you missed though is that removing the hdd voids the warranty.

 

Yes, that's what it says, but they can't actually do that. Seeing as it would be quite impossible for a hard drive upgrade to damage your processor or something of that nature, you can fight them on it. And failing that, you can sue them.

 

Unfortunately you would lose. The warranty offered by Apple and nearly every manufacturer is a limited warranty which does not have to meet the federal standards. This was a big issue with the iPhone and brickings. Magnuson only applies to full warranties.

Also, just curious for the OP, how much performance increase did you find by overclocking? In my experience on the desktop, overclocking generally results in modest gains that are barely worth it on a desktop machine with good cooling, and definitely not worth it on a notebook with less than ideal cooling.

 

Sorry to hear the bad news. I do not play games with my mac and I do not think that I will ever install windows on my macbook pro.
Good luck on your repair.

 

My macbook pro did boot back up again. I don't know what prevented it from booting for about 4 hours... but I was overclocking from 470 to 550 core, and from 635 to 880 for the memory. It was a pretty significant difference... I used it to play crysis with high shaders and high post processing, which really makes the game shine, and to play GoW in native res (1440x900) both of which are just on the verge of not being practical without the OC.

Anyway, I did get rid of windows at the moment and I think I might try out the osx version C&C3 and Madden 08 and maybe quake 4 or doom 3 until i feel comfortable with this thing...