Another way is by shutting down your Mac and then holding down Control + Option + Shift (may turn on the Mac). Wait a few seconds before turning on your Mac. Macbook laptops with T2 chip: Shut down your Mac, then hold the power button for 10 seconds.Wait 5 seconds before turning the Mac on. Desktop Macs: Disconnect power cord and wait about 15 seconds before plugging it back in.Depending on your Mac’s model, there are a few ways to reset the SMC: Giving it a reset to defaults could resolve your system problems. You could experience problems with power, battery, or slow performance if the SMC is malfunctioning. It also stores information related to fan and temperature control, keyboard and status lights, and so much more. The System Management Controller (SMC) is another hardware component that stores key startup settings. For older Macs that chime at boot, hold the four keys until you hear a second chime. Release the keys and let your Mac start up normally. To reset the NVRAM or PRAM, restart your Mac and hold down Command + Option + P + R for 20 seconds. This resolves startup disk issues back to default settings. When your Mac is taking forever to boot, resetting the NVRAM could be helpful.
The NVRAM stores less information, just the essentials like the time zone, screen resolution, and your selected startup disk. They both are essentially the same thing, just that modern Macs use NVRAM over PRAM. The parameter RAM (PRAM) or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) are both small amounts of memory that stores macOS boot up information. NVRAM / PRAM and SMC resets NVRAM / PRAM reset
Hard shutdowns is an abrupt way to turn off your Mac, it can cause software problems or even data loss on unsaved work. Always turn off your computer the normal way, that is by clicking the “Shut Down” option from the Apple logo dropdown menu. Remember though, only do hard shutdowns when you really need to. Restarting your computer can possibly boot it up again so you can do more thorough tests on your hardware. To perform a hard shutdown, just press and hold the power button on your Mac for about 6 seconds until it powers down. If your Mac gets stuck on a blank screen or loading screen, you can manually shut down and restart it to try turning it on again.Ī restart could possibly solve some software bugs and help you successfully boot up your Mac. Manually perform a hard shutdownĪ hard shutdown is what you would normally do when your computer freezes up and doesn’t respond to any keys or clicks. This involves some software and system resets. To fix your boot up issue, we should first start out by solving any possible software issues, then onto hardware testing and repair. While there are some known and obvious issues like hard drive failure, other errors need more thorough testing to diagnose. Software issues could also cause disruptions to the boot process. Your Mac needs the hard drive, logic board, RAM, and video card to work properly in order to boot successfully to macOS. There are a few things that your Mac needs to go through to boot successfully, and that involves both its software settings and essential hardware. This is also known to be a hard drive issue.Įrrors that appear during startup usually indicates that there’s a problem with the procedure and hardware involved with the Mac startup process. When this does happen, it may seem like the loading bar is taking forever to complete, or not at all. Infinite loading bar: Usually your Mac shouldn’t take too long to boot to macOS, or need to put you through a loading bar.A folder with a question mark on it means that your startup disk is not working or that your device can’t find a working operating system on it. Question mark folder icon: This is likely a hard drive issue.Shuts down at boot: In this scenario, your Mac does turn on, but shuts down by itself during boot.You can only solve this by restarting the Mac. Blank screen at boot: Your Mac turns on and lights up, but gets stuck on a blank screen forever.These boot up errors can look like a few of these scenarios: Now this can look like different errors too, and come from different kinds of software or hardware failure.
This is because your Mac still turns on, it’s just that it’s not booting to macOS. While it may seem alarming to find that your Mac isn’t booting up, there’s not much to worry about as you still have a lot of options to fix it. Then we can move on to checking on your hardware and repairing any possible faults. This includes some simple checks and software resets as a first step. Here’s a few things you could run through to fix the problem and get your Mac working again. Either way, you’re probably looking to boot it up normally again. It could be a software or hardware problem. A lot of things could cause a Macbook to stop booting up properly, or not even start up at all.