Crashed hard drive trying to retrieve photos

Roci said:

Hi all first time tried looking all over for my answer but nothing in particular to what I'm going through.

My problem is that when I log in to my user the computer freezes and never goes back to normal I took it to apple and got the hard drive was switched over and I kept the crashed one. Now is there anyway that I can retrieve my photos from girlfriends user.

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Your backup drive would have all the photos, so you should be able to easily access them there.

If you don't have backups, firstly...hit yourself over the head. Hard.

Next you will need the appropriate drive enclosure. I'm thinking it's most likely a 2.5" enclosure you need (but don't quote me on that). Your local computer store can point you in the right direction, but make sure you look at all of them...not the first one they show you, 'cos that would typically be the one with the most profit margin for them. There are plenty of applications out there to recover files from hard drives, but before you look at them, I would suggest you see what you can recover once you have the enclosure.

Good luck.

See if the drive will mount with an external enclosure. Chances are you'll be able to find the files (if it was booting then freezing, then perhaps the drive isn't TOTALLY dead). If it mounts but files are missing, try something like PhotoRec (google it) which works pretty well for recovering files.

Then, start doing backups! Hard drives fail. A lot. Even SSD's. Everyone should have a backup, preferably an off site one as well if at all possible.