MacBook 2,1 boots into black screen of death after reseting NVRAM

[Chinarut]

Hi! I've been working on a triple-boot MacBook and was soooooo close. the only thing that was missing was getting my mac to boot into rEFInd so I could boot into a Linux partition I already cloned.

I booted into a LiveCD and used efibootmgr to see what entries were in the table. Sure enough, after multiple installs of rEFInd from both Mac OS X and Ubuntu, an entry for rEFInd wouldn't be entered into the table.

So I thought as a next to last resort, I'd reset my NVRAM. That's when the problems started.

I tried to boot into OSX and it would hang. I tried booting in verbose mode - it would make it through the "terminal" part and then when it gets to the grey screen - it gets stuck [looking back, I think it's because OSX had trouble writing variables to NVRAM]

So I booted back into Linux and efibootmgr now would just hang and not output EFI entries - it really just took over the system. I had to force shutdown. Sometimes it would hang while printing out the EFI table halfway. Same thing, I had to force shutdown.

I thought it might be good idea to reset the NVRAM again and start from scratch.

The hanging just got worse and worse until finally one last boot into my MacBook and the sleep light is steady on, I hear the SuperDrive do it's thing and no more chime, no more grey screen - just black.

I tried taking my RAM modules out and when I turn the machine on, the sleep light blinks rapidly so I reseated the RAM modules and we're back to the black screen with the white steady light.

I've tried SMC reset, NVRAM reset (multiple times). I can't get to a boot screen.

The last thing I remember efibootmgr saying (and this is from memory mind you) is entry FFFF (what I understand to be default) needed to be loaded from firmware (or something along these lines)

So the only conclusion I can come to is because there is no default entry, my machine won't even boot from the internal drive by default.

Any suggestions on ressurecting my machine? At this point, if the NVRAM went bad, I have no problems making my MacBook a Linux-only machine. Is there any way to hardwire it to boot into my internal drive?

Ive seen replacement NVRAM batteries on iFixit - however, I never had an issue with my MacBook date going out of whack.

I can only assume the NVRAM chip is bad and that this is a bigger job to repair than just fetching a replacement.

Thanks for any input anyone can provide!

[Chinarut]

thought I'd bump this thread...

any input as to whether my hypothesis the NVRAM chip went bad based on (1) rEFInd not being able to write a new EFI entry and (2) resetting the NVRAM causing the beginnings of complete system failure on boot?

I've since replaced my MacBook with an iPad Pro (woo hoo!) and considering investing in a Raspberry Pi to fill my coding and Linux needs on the run so repairing this MacBook has officially become a hobby project and love to resurrect it from the dead if I can :)