This one was driving me crazy. The backstory is that I have disassembled my macbook pro (15", 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo) more times than anyone should have to. Six times. Every one of these was to deal with a disk upgrade and subsequent breaking of bluetooth. The first three of the disassemblies were to deal with a disk upgrade. More on that at the end.
The hardest part was figuring out where the bluetooth was. Someone had posted the service manual on scribd which was essential to me solving the problem.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8237/Macbook-Pro
Page 63 shows the connection to the antennae, which gets moved out of the way when you replace a drive. This seems to be encased in something similar to scotch tape. Apparently, on the third disk swap, this tape tore just where the antennae attaches, so that the antennae sometimes could short out on the metal side to the disk compartment. Of course, this would happen only sometimes. The fix was to pull off the whole mess and replace with electrical tape. It's working grand! I saw a post someplace (I've lost it) where someone had a bluetooth problem after a disk replacement; I can see this happening often.
In my case, I think it was just lots of handling that led to the failure. (1) I replaced the disk to get more space. (2) The new drive failed, so I pulled it and put the old one back. (3) Got a replacement drive, so I had to put that in. The last three disassemblies were to fix bluetooth.
The thing I learned AFTER I put the replacement disk in, is that the Seagate drives in this series have issues. I hope this one doesn't fail also. The first one took almost 3 months to fail. It's a Seagate ST9250421AS. So I might end up taking two more trips inside, and I now have enough used space that I can no longer fit on the original drive, so replacement will be painful.
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The problem eventually returned. I haven't tried this yet, but given my symptoms I would guess this will be an effective solution for me:
ReplyDeletehttp://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1172382&tstart=0&messageID=9308838#9308838
In the end, I gave up. The problem is clearly mechanical, since pressing down on the keyboard surface just above where the bluetooth module is placed has an effect on the problem. There were times when it would only work when I was exerting pressure, and immediately fail when I let go. I suspect it has something to do with the antennae and how it reacts with the surface. What I did in the end was pull the module out, and bought a USB bluetooth adapter from amazon. I tried leaving the original module in at first, but this seemed to confuse connections.
ReplyDeleteProblem solved, but not ideal.