Emigration problems between two MBPs

[Thedutchjelle]

Hello people,

My mother's laptop (an old macbook pro) graphic card died yesterday. Upon launching it would make the startup "humm" sound, but the screen would remain a solid gray. Since the repair was estimated to be much higher than the machine was worth, we went out to buy a new MacBook Pro 13"".

Although she now has a machine for her work and personal needs, she still has all those photos and other data left on her old Macbook. We went through the Migration-thing that launches when a new Apple computer first started. We connected the two Macs with a Firewire cable, and then restarted the defect computer while holding the T-button.

Much to our surprise, it actually showed the firewire-logo on the defect notebook. The new Macbook pro told us a Firewire connection had been made. But then, when we clicked on "next step", the spinning wheel came up and we're still at that now. Both computers are now completely unresponsive to any input.

Since one of our computers is defect, we're starting to wonder if it's even possible this way - are there steps being presented on the defect computer that we cannot see? Is the new Macbook Pro being sluggish?

Does someone has an idea as to what could be going wrong here? We would like to be able to solve this on our own, but I guess if we can't we'll have to bring the defect computer to an expert to retrieve the data.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[getz76]

Since one of the machines is defective, I would venture to guess therein lies your problem.

Buy an external 2.5" case or dock with USB or FireWire and pull the drive from the defective machine. Hook up the USB or FireWire to the new machine and copy the data over.

 

[Detrius]

A bad hard drive could cause all of the symptoms you've described, including the machine booting to nothing but a gray screen. Who told you that the graphics chip on the laptop was bad, and what was the evidence?

 

[Thedutchjelle]

My father called a friend of his that repairs computers (not sure.. ) and they were told it could be the graphics card.

I am not _quite_ sure what the tale of it was, this is how they told it to me.

However, if the harddrive is bad, what are the chances of retrieving data from it? And was buying a new macbook pro the best choice in such a case?

 

[Detrius]

My father called a friend of his that repairs computers (not sure.. ) and they were told it could be the graphics card.

I am not _quite_ sure what the tale of it was, this is how they told it to me.

However, if the harddrive is bad, what are the chances of retrieving data from it? And was buying a new macbook pro the best choice in such a case?

Oh, so no one ever actually looked at the computer? Your symptoms sound like a bad hard drive to me. The chances of retrieving data depend entirely on the drive, but if the drive is bad enough that your computer gets stuck trying to identify it, then it doesn't look good.

Well, you now have a new MacBook Pro. That's always nice. Though if it was the hard drive, you could have fixed the old one pretty easily. There's also the possibility it could have been the hard drive cable, and that would have been dirt cheap.