MD: Your Mac may get unresponsive after a power outage or as a result of overheating. Here’s what you can do to activate it for further remedial action.

Mac Not Turning on? Here Are DIY Remedies

Seeing your Mac not turning off is always an unpleasant surprise. Reasons for such a problem may be numerous –physical damage, a sudden power outage causing an emergency shutdown, or suspicious overheating of your device can all end with the device’s inability to start. Is it dangerous? And how to reanimate your device for further work or at least to diagnose the trouble?

Follow us on Gadgetsay Telegram channel

Here we deal specifically with the problem of not turning on, which some Macs may experience for various reasons. You might need to use a bootable installer as one of the first aid methods, and in this article, we show how to create it and use it for a quick fix of your device.

The First Steps

Once you see that your Mac doesn’t respond to pressing the “On” button, you may try the following method:

  • Press and hold the power button. This activity should be done for at least 10 seconds for the force-activation to start. This measure works well when your Mac gets stuck amid a working session and show no signs of response to your actions and commands. Thus, after pressing the power button for 10 seconds, you’ll see it turning off forcefully.
  • Now that you force-turned the Mac off, you may try a regular activation mode. Press the power button as usual and see whether the device will start.
  • If the Mac starts, but gets stuck on some basic tasks, run the process once more and restart the computer in safe mode to perform troubleshooting. The safe mode typically removes all the clutter and leaves only essential processes working. Thus, you will have a good chance to diagnose the problem and turn the device on as usual afterward.

Firmware Revival

The measures we’ve just discussed can work in everyday situations when no damage occurs to Mac’s internal system files. However, emergency outages can sometimes cause Mac’s security system to block the firmware, which needs a restart. The following measures can fit this purpose:

  • A bootable controller
  • The latest Apple configurator app
  • Another Mac with a similar OS version
  • A USB-C or USB-A cable needed to connect the two laptops.

If you use this scheme, the second computer with a working OS will serve as your bootable installer, giving the deactivated Mac a performance boost even in the turned-off mode.

Creating a Bootable Installer

Bootable installers are highly relevant for such cases as they help install macOS on devices that either don’t have it or function improperly because of the critical OS damage. Besides, the approach may help if you have insufficient system storage to host the new OS together with the old one during an update. Thus, the approach may be beneficial in many cases, and here’s how you can do this quickly:

  • Get an external USB drive with enough storage space to locate the OS for your Mac.
  • Use the Mac’s Disk Utility app to format the drive into the Mac-readable format.
  • Download the OS from the official resource (App Store).
  • Connect the USB drive to your Mac and launch Terminal.
  • Select and copy the OS files to transfer them to the non-responsive Mac.
  • The Terminal will erase your hard drive and replace it with the new OS data exported from the external drive.

At times, your Mac will not let you use an external drive as a startup disk. To go on with this task, you may need to adjust the device’s security settings. First, you need to reboot the device in recovery mode (check the instructions for your specific Mac model) and enter the macOS password for authentication. In this way, you allow booting the Mac from external or removable media. Once this feature is enabled, you can leave the menu, and restart the startup as initially intended.

See Also Editor’s Pick: 7 Common Macbook Problems and Ways to Fix Them

It’s Only First Aid

Here we’ve covered some basic steps for a quick remedy of your Mac that stopped turning on for some reason. Please keep in mind that these measures are temporary and can only help you solve the problem in the short run. If your Mac starts going off abruptly and refuses to restart, these troubles can be a sign of greater damage. So, we recommend a thorough audit after you manage to bring your Mac back to life.