How can I recover data from original HD

Evo13 said:

So I have had the grey bar appearing and my MBP failing to boot up with the original HD it came with, Hitachi 320 GB. I took it out and replaced it with a Samsung 840 Evo SSD and still have some data I would like to take out from my original HD.

I purchased a usb to HDD adapter so I can plug it in externally in hopes to clone it and back it up on to my external HD, but have had no luck. I am running out of hope and ideas of how I can get stuff off of that drive, I am thinking of going into an Apple store and see if they can help me, yeah I am that desperate at this point.

I first purchased a SABRENT USB 3.0 TO SATA/IDE 2.5/3.5/5.25-INCH Hard Drive Converter but I would not see my HD, it would appear on disc utility but it would be greyed out.

Click to expand...

Only thing I can think of is to use target disk mode. It requires two MacBooks and a thunderbolt cable. The old hard drive has to be within one of the two Max. I doubt this is an option for you though.

Evo13 said:

So I have had the grey bar appearing and my MBP failing to boot up with the original HD it came with, Hitachi 320 GB.

Click to expand...

This is classic hard drive failure. Have you tried using disk utility or something similar to repair the disk?

I am running out of hope and ideas of how I can get stuff off of that drive, I am thinking of going into an Apple store and see if they can help me, yeah I am that desperate at this point.

Click to expand...

This is why it is so important to backup your data. There are companies out there that can get the data for you, but you're not going to like the price tag.

Take it to a specialist recovery firm - but it can get really expensive really quickly. The possibilities range from a simple repair of the drive electronics through to your data is physically destroyed by a disk crash. There is no guarantee your data is recoverable at all, at any price.

But take it to a specialist if that is what you want to do - and backup your data from now on.

Evo13 said:

Would you know if the Genuis bar could retrieve the data?

Click to expand...

Data recovery isn't really their specialty. I doubt they're going to be able to do much.

Evo13 said:

When I was able to get into disc utility I did run a disc verifcation, it then prompted me to run the repair, maybe a minute after running the repair, it said it failed to repair the disc.

Would you know if the Genuis bar could retrieve the data?




Thanks for the heads up, would those cables where I can maybe put the drive into an enclosure or connect it via usb would work for me or I need to go to a specialist?

Click to expand...

Only in the highly unlikely event that the problem is in the Mac electronics. Most likely is that it is the disk unit that has failed. In that case putting it in anything will not help. A specialist <may> be able to repair the drive to extract the data but equally may not. For the money, put it in a caddy to prove it one way or another.

Recovering data from old Macbook HD

I had a somewhat similar issue with my early 2008 15" MBP Pro, but it wasn't direct HD failure- it was my graphics card/logic board from what the Apple Genius tech told me. Rather than invest another $375 on a repair on a 6 year old computer, I bought myself a late 2013 13" Macbook Pro Retina with SSD.

However, I wanted to transfer all my old files (no Time Machine). I purchased Sabrent USB2.0 to SATA/IDE HD Adapter and a NexStar TX 2.5" SATA HD Enclosure. After I opened up my 15" MBP Pro and removed my old HD carefully, I placed it inside the enclosure.

Unfortuntely, it wouldn't connect since there were too many errors on the HD. I tried Disk Utility to verify and repair permissions, however- it was unable to do that.

I read online that a more powerful program, Disk Warrior might be able to remedy this. I purchased the program and it was able to successfully repair the errors.

HD booted right onto my new Macbook Pro Retina. Able to transfer files pretty easily. A nice surprise was that I could even hook up an older Dell notebook HD and still move files back and forth.