Crashed MacBook Pro-possibly recover files

[mdem78]

Hi all, I am new here and stumbled across the site in a google search.
I am naive to any kid of repairing anything but a couple of weeks ago my hard drive crashed on my macbook pro. I started it up and got a simple white screen and heard a clicking noise coming from what sounded like the CD drive (which I later learned was the hard drive)

I brought the laptop into the apple store and thankfully had applecare for a few more months so they were able to put in in a new hard drive for me at no cost. They gave me back my hard drive so I do have that but it is obviously in no enclosing what so ever.

I was hoping there would be a way I could try myself to recover files (mostly concerned with family and clients photographs from the past 3 months-everything else was backed up already) I had on my desktop but since I am not a techy person I was wondering if some one can explain the best way (in laimans terms) to try to recover the photos.

Thank you in advance.

 

[blueroom]

You could put it in a USB to SATA enclosure. They're cheap and common. If the files show up, copy them. If not a professional drive recovery service is very expensive.

For future reference get a backup solution. Time Machine is awesome, iCloud, a NAS (Synology), DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive... There's no excuse anymore not to have at least some form of automatic backup.

PS clicking HDDs usually mean a head crash (unrecoverable without a professional service).

 

[T5BRICK]

You could put it in a USB to SATA enclosure. They're cheap and common. If the files show up, copy them. If not a professional drive recovery service is very expensive.

For future reference get a backup solution. Time Machine is awesome, iCloud, a NAS (Synology), DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive... There's no excuse anymore not to have at least some form of automatic backup.

PS clicking HDDs usually mean a head crash (unrecoverable without a professional service).

I agree on all points. A clicking hard drive is most likely unrecoverable, but an external enclosure is pretty cheap so it's worth a try.

If simply putting it into the enclosure doesn't help, you could always try the freezer trick or sometimes a good mechanical shock will help(either one of these can also kill the drive, so don't try them unless you have no other option.)

 

[mdem78]

Thanks for the tips, I do back up regularly (external drive, and crashplan) but time got the best of me so I lost 3 months of photos. Not the end of the world but had a friends newborn twins photos on there. Can you possibly send me a link to a cheap enclosure to test this out?


Thanks again in advance for the help.

 

[bcburrows]

I had exactly the same problem and I used an external case to house my HDD in then reconnected and I used DiskWarrior and recovered pretty much everything. Not saying it will work for you but it did for me.

Now just to make clear, I am not employed by Diskwarrior, receive any money from them whatsoever nor do I own any shares etc. I simply want to pass on to people who are in a similar situation to me just how great this was for me.