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Help! daughter's macbook pro has blinking question mark-paper due

Weaselboy said:
Yes exactly. That drive is bad and needs to be replaced. I see you show your location as Dallas? Just run over to Best Buy and grab this drive and install it then use Internet recovery like I described to get the OS on there and the machine running again.

Then grab a USB enclosure like this and put the old drive inside and see what you can recover.

Here is a walk through to replace the drive. You will also need a size 00 Phillips driver and a #6 Torx driver. You can grab both at Home Depot.
Click to expand...

Awesome!
I have hooked her computer to mine and I see the desktop. I put all of her files into one folder now I can't figure out how to get it to my desktop. The apple walk through says there is an icon but I don't see it on my desktop or hers

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I held down the t command on hers and I see her desktop now, as though it was fine. Is that what I should see
I have hooked her computer to mine and I see the desktop. I put all of her files into one folder now I can't figure out how to get it to my desktop. The apple walk through says there is an icon but I don't see it on my desktop or hers
 
brobson said:
Awesome!
I have hooked her computer to mine and I see the desktop. I put all of her files into one folder now I can't figure out how to get it to my desktop. The apple walk through says there is an icon but I don't see it on my desktop or hers

----------

I held down the t command on hers and I see her desktop now, as though it was fine. Is that what I should see
I have hooked her computer to mine and I see the desktop. I put all of her files into one folder now I can't figure out how to get it to my desktop. The apple walk through says there is an icon but I don't see it on my desktop or hers
Click to expand...

If you held T on her machine, you should be able to see her entire drive in Finder on yours (you probably have yours set not to show external drives on the desktop). Just open Finder and look on the left for her drive. You can then just drag/drop data from her drive to yours. Maybe make a folder on your desktop for this.
 
Weaselboy said:
If you held T on her machine, you should be able to see her entire drive in Finder on yours (you probably have yours set not to show external drives on the desktop). Just open Finder and look on the left for her drive. You can then just drag/drop data from her drive to yours. Maybe make a folder on your desktop for this.
Click to expand...

its honestly not there, just my harddrive and i am seeing all of her stuff on her desktop like normal. I've copied her desktop but can't back up in time machine.
Not sure if I have all of the stuff shes done since her last back up.

but she's one luck girl to have you guys!!!!
 
brobson said:
its honestly not there, just my harddrive and i am seeing all of her stuff on her desktop like normal. I've copied her desktop but can't back up in time machine.
Not sure if I have all of the stuff shes done since her last back up.

but she's one luck girl to have you guys!!!!
Click to expand...

I'm confused. If you held T on her machine it should boot to target disk mode and show her disk on your Mac and you can open that volume in Finder and copy files. How are you seeing her Desktop?

Also, assuming the Time Machine backup was made with a locally attached drive (like USB) we can use that to restore everything to the new drive when you get it installed and avoid an OS reinstall. Of course you still need to capture data between the last backup and now somehow manually.
 
Weaselboy said:
I'm confused. If you held T on her machine it should boot to target disk mode and show her disk on your Mac and you can open that volume in Finder and copy files. How are you seeing her Desktop?

Also, assuming the Time Machine backup was made with a locally attached drive (like USB) we can use that to restore everything to the new drive when you get it installed and avoid an OS reinstall. Of course you still need to capture data between the last backup and now somehow manually.
Click to expand...

I mustve not done it right but it worked anyhow. Thanks a million!
Apple says it is a cable and replaced it for $60 but being the pessimist I am I hope thats all it is.
Really appreciate the help and taking the time to answer me. You and IAMMACPEARSON :)
 
brobson said:
I mustve not done it right but it worked anyhow. Thanks a million!
Apple says it is a cable and replaced it for $60 but being the pessimist I am I hope thats all it is.
Really appreciate the help and taking the time to answer me. You and IAMMACPEARSON :)
Click to expand...

I'm glad you got your issues sorted! I started reading and guessed it was the cable. Same thing happened to my 2009 MBP. Fair warning that this may happen again, unfortunately. Those cables are flimsy. I'm surprised it happend on a 2012 though since I though they started using a better cable in 2011.

Anyway, your daughter should probably do backups fairly regularly and consider saving to external storage or a cloud just to be safe. Google Drive is really useful since you can create and edit documents right in the site. Or there's iCloud if she uses iWork or Microsoft OneDrive for Office. Dropbox is also good and just stores files in the cloud. With all of these you can download onto any computer with the account login for whichever service you're using.
 
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