Matthew

A little while back my A1534 decided not to boot anymore and I'm no longer getting any ding when I plug the device in....

Yes this piece does require micro-soldering to replace.

With the magsafe adapter still staying green after being unplugged from the wall, I have to ask, are you using the original charger that came with the computer or a official apple magsafe charger, or are you using a unbranded or third party charger?

First off, if you are concerned about someone stealing your card info, you shouldn't have a RFID card. Reguardless the prevention of data theft is best practiced by keeping yor card safe. Secondly, to answer your question, the Duct Tape is not thick enough to prevent theft. The thin metalic layer is simply jsut not enough.

From working with 1,000 + Mac Book Air units mid-2011 11", we have seen this problem many times, this is more than likely caused by a low battery or a miss configured SMC. The most common fix is to go ahead and power off the machine, then plug it in. Take note of the light, is it green, amber, or very dull almost not lighting up? Hold the LEFT SIDE Command, Option,P,R keys while simultaneously pressing the power button and letting only the power go, the light on the MagSafe connector should light up green momentarily then switch amber. Let this charge till its green then start the device. This should result in a better response.

After instilling the drive, Boot the machine into recovery mode and then open disk utility to format the new drive and then make sure its set to be used with OS X. (Guid Partition Map) After that boot into the original OS X and download the most current issue of OS X from the App Store. Once it downloads you can install it to the drive you just put in, let it setup and boot to that. (If you have anything on the old drive that you want to keep then when setting up OS X use the transfer assistant and select your old hard drive.) Once the OS X has installed, boot into recovery again, open disk utility. You can erase the old drive, formatting it to OS X Journaled making it an available storage unit while your operating system lays on the new drive. Click on the Apple icon on the top left hand of the screen and select "Startup Disk", from there select the new drive. From now on your mac should boot from the new drive and use that as the primary disk while the old one acts as a secondary drive available for...