If you wake up one day but your Mac doesn’t, you may feel like your life has stopped thinking about losing your files, photos, documents, etc. No – there are just a few methodical steps you need to take to get your Mac turned on.
Table of Contents
Solutions for Mac not turning on
Check the battery
The first step is to check if the battery life of your Mac is still available (or, for iMacs, that the cable is connected properly). Shutdown your Mac & turn it back on. If you have an old MacBook, your MagSafe will show a green light while the computer is charging and a yellow light while it’s still charging.
Usually, try to use only Apple-made cables. While they may be more expensive, they tend to be safer for your Mac and don’t put extra strain on your battery life.
Reboot your Mac
You can always try your luck with this solution. Just press and hold the power button for a few seconds. When the Mac turns off, disconnect all peripherals, including the mouse, the keyboard, or any other external storage devices. Then you can restart the Mac to see whether it boots up as usual or not. If this method doesn’t work, it doesn’t hurt anything.
Turn off the device & then turn back on
If you believe your Mac won’t turn on, you can turn on Power Cycle to give it a try.
- On a modern MacBook without removable battery like MacBook Pro 13 with Touch Bar and MacBook Pro 15 with Touch Bar, you can long hold the power button to shut down, wait for ten seconds around, & then reboot the MacBook.
- For some older MacBook like MacBook Air 13 and MacBook 13 whose battery is removable, you can forcibly shut it down, unplug it, remove the battery, and wait for seconds. and then you need to put the battery back & restart the Mac.
Hope this will fix the problem on your Mac.
Put your Mac in Safe Mode
If you’re still having trouble, you can restart your MacBook to go through a very minor process that might affect your Mac from working properly. This requires you enter Safe Mode:
- Shutdown your Mac.
- Immediately press and hold the Shift key as you press the power button to start up.
- Release the key once you see the Apple logo and the login window. Then log in to your computer.
- You might be asked to login twice depending on whether you have FileVault on or not.
- Now you can find Safe Boot in the upper-right corner of the window on the login screen.
Now that you know that the situation with your Mac isn’t hopeless, you’re almost on the edge. You can further go into Verbose mode to find out who is the troublemaker and eliminate it.
Repair your Mac in recovery mode
If your startup disk is corrupted or damaged, it can also cause the Mac doesn’t turn on as usual. The good news is that your Mac has a handy method called Disk Utility which you can access from Recovery Mode. Recommended post for data recovery.
- Reboot the computer. Immediately press and hold Command + Option + R keys.
- Release the keys when you see the Apple logo or other startup screen.
- If you are asked to enter a firmware password or the login PIN, just enter the requested password.
- Now your computer is in the macOS Recovery Mode and you can see the macOS Utilities window.
- Select Disk Utility and click Continue.
- You could see Macintosh HD on the left sidebar and select it.
- Click First Aid on the top of the menu.
- Choose Run when you see the message window.
When the process is complete, try to restart the computer, is it normal now?
