My MBP just shut down without warning

This is the second time it's happened this month. I had enough battery. It just BANG turned off without warning. Can I look in record logs for something to help me understand what happened? I worry this might be a serious, serious problem and I dont know how to go about evaluating it.

It sounds like the battery might have a fault. take it to apple and have them diagnose it. does it do it when its plugged?

It would also help with year and model along with what you were doing when this happened.

Sadly, i dont live near an apple store, so i want to try and figure things out at home.

I'm using OS 10.7.4 on a 17 inch MBP from 2009.

It just happened again this morning. It turned off. I turned it back on and it turned off again. I figured I'd try and reset the SMC as I heard that could be one answer. I did it. I tried to turn it on again and I heard the on chime ring, ring a 2nd time while the screen went gray, then for 1 second the computer made these HORRIBLE static-y sounds, and then it shut off. I thought it was totally fried. But, after trying to turn it on again 20 minutes later, it went on.

It's turned off each time with me unplugged. I wonder if that's part of it.

So, any thoughts for what I should do from here? I'm not sure what to try and do to solve the problem. I'm attaching as a text file the console messages from when it was shutting off.

I'm really worried my computer is going to just crap out at any moment now so any help or advice would be great.

View attachment my crash log.pdf

Grab Coconut Battery or Battery Health for the Mac app store and see what they say about the staus of your battery.

Definitely sounds like a faulty battery. There's a chance it's the battery interface in your Mac but at 3+ years old the battery would be the most likely candidate

Well, it happened this morning with the chord in. I used Battery Health but it says it's OK. I have no idea what more to do. Any thoughts for self-diagnosing this? Again today, it shut off and when I tried to turn it on, it gave the on-chime, gave it again as the screen went grey, made staticy noise, and then shut off after one second.

OK. If it's still happening on mains power time to work out if it's hardware or software.

1. Backup your Mac.
2. Run the Apple Hardware Test Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test
3. If the hardware test shows all OK. Do a clean install of Leopard from your OSX disc

Macs have been designed in such a way to warn users and technicians of faults through chimes and blinking lights. For instance, faulty or missing RAM will cause a Mac to blink the power LED. This article lists a few of these combinations for iMacs but you'll notice that in the list of affected machines is the mid 2009 15" MBP (is this yours?). If that is your machine, do any of those combinations look familiar?

None of those looks familiar. I'm now backing up, crossing fingers it does not crash while my hard drive is being updated, and then ill run the hardware test.

thanks for all this help. ive never actually had my Mac was on the brink of dying before. grrr....

Regardless, I'm willing to bet that the multiple beeps and crashing is related to a hardware fault. Do you happen to have spare hardware around that you can use to replace your current pieces with (for the purposes of testing)? A hard drive crash wouldn't cause this so ideally, we could try swapping out RAM chips.

I dont. I'd be near that stuff in two weeks but till then I'm in a rural area visiting friends and near nothing. Question: if it's faulty hardware, are all these crashes bad for the computer? Do they run the risk of messing up things besides the root of the problem? I'm curious whether or not I should use my computer in the next few weeks....

I feel like a big tell is the fact that when it doesnt turn back on immediately after turning off, it does the same "two chimes, grey with no apple, static noise and OFF!". But i dont know what that means.

Nor do I and nor do I understand what the fault is and the (possible) consequences. Did you try the AHT as suggested by mrplow (here)?

I tried but cant. I dont have the startup disk and it's not working just by hitting D. I'll have to wait two weeks till I'm near a start up disk to use. Sigh...