Everything you do from this post is on you, and has nothing to do with me — this is just a collection of information and my personal anecdote on fixing my Mac. If you brick your sh*t, don’t look at me, this is just how I did it, and it worked for me. I didn’t tell you to try this!
Normally I do not post stuff like this because, well, I have a blog about all things light and lighting. But I guess also having a life means I post stuff here that relates to my lighting life.
I have had a 17″ Macbook Pro that has been awesome and still to this day helps me rock. I use it every day all day long and have since 2011; I run my pre-viz software on it, I have bootcamp on it for console software, etcetera. However, after Mountain Lion, I started having some issues. Pay close attention:
- Had a motherboard issue in summer 2013 (video flicker was causing some issues, had a bad VPU), I had the mobo replaced under warranty in Illinois by a small shop that luckily did Mac repairs.
- Upgraded to Mountain Lion right after that, I noticed that iMessages stopped working, and I could no longer sign into Facetime via my Mac.
- I resigned myself to not paying the thirty bucks to Apple, because, you know, “I got this.”
- Three years later, I upgrade to El Capitan. Cool, right?
- ALL THINGS iCLOUD and iTUNES STOPPED WORKING on my Macbook Pro.
I researched everything I could possibly find on how to fix this — people recommended resetting the keychain, creating a NEW keychain, maybe I had to just restart (seriously? Come on, give a man some credit), and doing some serious command line switches that were intimidating the crap out of me…
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208292/cant-login-in-mac-app-store-or-icloud-login-loading-forever
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3ndlb4/since_updating_to_el_capitan_i_get_this_pop_up/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204926
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2015/12/23/common-os-x-el-capitan-problems-fixes/
http://www.macworld.com/article/2981740/operating-systems/el-capitan-faq-everything-you-need-to-know-about-os-x-10-11.html
…Just as a few examples of WTF.
I wrote this into the Support communities website, with no results:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7408563
And then I notice that my serial number, under About My Mac under the Apple logo top left, it said “UN KNOWN” instead of what it should read. This had to be the problem.
I tracked this back to the place where my mac was fixed, and sure enough, they forgot to re-flash my serial number to the motherboard of my machine. So all of the problems I have been having have been BECAUSE of my new motherboard and no serial number. Once I figured out how to re-flash my serial number to the motherboard, absolutely every f*cking thing that was wrong had righted itself.
I found the motherboard serializer program over at RogersM, he had a very similar issue with this serial number after installing a game he liked. Silly shit!
Here’s what I did:
- First and foremost, this is for you when you have a serial number already to your legal non-stolen mac. Don’t be a douchebag.
- I downloaded the Blank Motherboard Serializer program, which is an Apple-only thing. You’re pretty much taking your own shit into your hands at this point, but it’s all good if you just pay attention.
- Unzip the Serializer, then burn it to a disc by right clicking on it and choosing the .DMG and burning it to a disc. Simple.
- I had to learn the hard way that you need a USB or laser keyboard and mouse to do this — the onboard Mac keyboard NOR a mac bluetooth keyboard worked in this situation.
- Throw the CD into your CD drive
- Power down.
- Hold down ALT, which is the Mac Boot Picker key, and power up while still holding ALT. You’ll see your Mac partition, then if you have one, the Bootcamp partition, then after a few moments once the CD spools up, you’ll see that as a boot choice. Pick it.
- Follow the prompts. It’s gonna ask you to type in your Serial Number, so make sure you have it WRITTEN DOWN OR PRINTED OUT before you do this.
- Make sure you enter that sucker in right.
- You’re done.
Now, if you were experiencing the bad serial number problem, you are no longer experiencing the bad serial number problem. Holy crap, am I glad the research pointed me that direction.
