MacBook fans work but won’t spin up; computer overheats and turns off
Inherited a 2012 13” Retina MacBook Pro (Model A1425) running MacOS Catalina. It’s in decent condition but has a weird problem - the fans don’t turn on by themselves so it just overheats and shuts down after a few minutes.
If I run Macs Fan Control I can turn on the fans manually and the system cools down and runs no problem, but I need to wipe the system and reinstall MacOS so I need to figure out how to get the fans working as ‘system controlled’. I stupidly started the system restore process before fixing this so now I’m stuck without a bootable OS because every time the system starts to reinstall MacOS it overheats and shuts down 🤦🏻♂️
Here’s what TG Pro shows when idling:
So far I’ve tried:
- Resetting SMC
- Resetting PRAM
- Starting in diagnostics mode (won’t start - gives me a command line error ‘Cannot Load "EFI/Drivers/TestSupport.eft*’ - I think Apple broke it for Catalina
All the internal temp sensors seem to register correctly so I don’t know why the fans aren’t spinning of their own accord. Maybe there’s something in settings I can reset or edit whilst in safe mode to get the fans working properly again??
People asked for a photo of the inside. I can’t see anything visually wrong with a cursory glance; haven’t removed the heat sink yet as to my mind if the sensors are reporting temps correctly and the fans are both spinning when I manually set them then the problem doesn’t lie in the heat sink/paste, though I could always replace the latter anyway…
Cette question est-elle utile ?