Access Data from dead SSD?

[CTYankee]

One of the Macbook Airs in our company died. The internal SSD does not show up at all:

-option key startup...not listed
-boot to recovery partition....works, but no other partition listed
-boot from external drive...computer works, but no other partition listed
-Disk Warrior does not see internal drive
-Disk Utility does not see internal drive
-Tech Tool Pro does not see internal drive
-System Profiler (Pending...forgot to check that)

Assuming the computer's SSD is not going to connect, is there a way to open up the Macbook Air and pull the SSD to try and connect it to something else to extract data. The user has two email folders where he archives email...locally. Oh, and backups? Nope.

this user is a poster child for how not to use email. He insisted on doing it his way. Now he sees why we strongly urge users to do things our way.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Yeah just put it in another Mac and see what happens, or buy the relevant enclosure, something like:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MAU3ENVOY11/

 

[960design]

Yep... mount it using an external drive to pull all non-damaged data from it. Just did this for a guy. Replaced his old drive with a new SSD and returned all of his school documents. There were a couple of images that were unrecoverable and that was about it.

 

[CTYankee]

Yep... mount it using an external drive to pull all non-damaged data from it. Just did this for a guy. Replaced his old drive with a new SSD and returned all of his school documents. There were a couple of images that were unrecoverable and that was about it.

When you booted the computer from an external drive, did it see the drive at all? Or was it like this where nothing could see it in the Macbook Air but in an external enclosure it would mount?

 

[960design]

When you booted the computer from an external drive, did it see the drive at all?

This question seems misleading and difficult to answer. Here is what I did in more detail:

I could not boot the computer as the drive was dead/damaged. I used an Ubuntu live USB to boot from to see if anything would work. Amazingly it did and I could see some data on the drive. I removed the SSD and installed it into an external enclosure. From there I just copied all the available data, tried a couple of repair techniques, none worked and recommended a new drive. A new SSD was purchased, pushed Win8.1 on to it ( original OS ) asked if I should upgrade to WIN10 while it was still free ( MS has not closed the upgrade servers to valid license holders yet, even though it has been over a year for no more free upgrades ). Setup a duplicate account and pushed all the data back into the proper places.