Chosen Solution
Blown Capacitor Zoomed out for reference. I bought this computer on ebay because they said it had been dropped and the screen broken so I figured that it would be a simple display swap to get it working again. The computer model is a 15" Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz Unibody mid 2009. However that did not work and upon further investigation it looks like a capacitor on the motherboard has blown. It is right by the optical drive you can see the location of it in my zoomed out picture. It looks like its just one cap and its very obvious it even left a little smoke trail that I’ve circled. So my question is does anyone know what value that cap is or how to find out without having to buy a broken board on ebay for 150 just for a 10 cent part. I welcome any thoughts about if that would even fix it. Currently the display is the only thing that doesn’t work. When hooked up to an external display it works like a champ.
ivanmacuser, I used the 820-2523-B from your image to locate the part. It is not a capacitor. The component that got “smoked” on your board, is logic board designator L3404, it is a FERR-120-OHM-1.5A. It is a ferrite bead used for EMI control. If it “smoked”, and it sure looks like it did, then you definitely had significant current passing through it. Before you replace it, check to make sure that you do not have a short somewhere else. Check the resistance to ground which should measure 0ohms. Something like this http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en… should work for you. Not sure where you are located, so the Murata number is BLM15EG121SN1D. The interesting part on this is, that this component is actually part of the WLAN circuit. So you may have some other issues as well. However, replace this one and re-evaluate. Hope this helps, good luck.
