Long startup/frozen main screen via physically damaged harddrive on MBP 13"

[spiltmilk]

hi again,

thanks to the helpful people from here, I've established that my harddrive has been physically damaged but no other parts.
I've ordered the replacement hdd and it's on its way, however, backup is now the issue.

startup takes longer and longer each time. 5 minutes at first, then 10, then 30, and last night it managed to get to an hour just to startup to the main screen.

now that I'm at the main screen, I literally cannot do anything except for move the spinning pinwheel around. the clock is frozen, some of the icons in the menu bar haven't loaded and some of the icons don't load.

my question now is: how can I backup a failing harddrive?

thanks for reading.

 

[hehe299792458]

hi again,

thanks to the helpful people from here, I've established that my harddrive has been physically damaged but no other parts.
I've ordered the replacement hdd and it's on its way, however, backup is now the issue.

startup takes longer and longer each time. 5 minutes at first, then 10, then 30, and last night it managed to get to an hour just to startup to the main screen.

now that I'm at the main screen, I literally cannot do anything except for move the spinning pinwheel around. the clock is frozen, some of the icons in the menu bar haven't loaded and some of the icons don't load.

my question now is: how can I backup a failing harddrive?

thanks for reading.

take out your hdd and never use it again. when the new one arrives, install OS X and try to recover as much data from old drive as possible

 

[spiltmilk]

try to recover as much data from old drive as possible

do you suggest any cost-efficient methods?

 

[borisiii]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

You could buy a 2.5" eSATA USB enclosure on ebay or amazon. That would let you mount your damaged drive as an external. There's no guarantee you would be able to get any data off it, given that it sounds pretty screwed but it may be worth a try for $10-20.

If you had a time machine backup that would be the best way to get your data back, and if you don't this should serve as a valuable lesson about why you should regularly back up.