How to Boot MacBook Pro Without a Battery (Older Models 2006 – 2011)

You may have noticed that sometimes you can not power on and boot a MacBook Pro when it doesn’t have a battery installed. Let’s say you had to remove the battery of an older MacBook Pro because it was swelling, or the battery failed for some other reason, but when you go to power on the MacBook Pro, nothing happens. (To be clear, this article is aimed at older MacBook Pro model years, like a 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, back when replacing a battery, hard disk, RAM, was all fairly easy to do by opening the bottom case).
In this situation, if a battery is removed or totally dead and you attempt to start the MacBook Pro, nothing happens – there is no sound, no system boot, no startup chime, nothing. It turns out that some model year MacBook Pro computers will not boot with a simple power button press after the battery has been physically removed or disconnected.
Of course if you happen to have a replacement battery then you can typically just replace the missing battery with a working battery and the MacBook Pro will boot, but that is not always an option. So let’s discuss how to boot an older MacBook Pro when there is no battery present at all.


















