MacBook Pro data gonna be gone?

[npolly0212]

I have recently been using my MacBook Pro, until the other night I left it off the charger and it died. Well I decided to plug it in the next day after work to go on and look at some school work for the past semester.

Well when I got it turned on and to the login screen I could type in my password and it would load up.

Now every time it hits the half loaded screen it shuts down and I can no longer access anything on my MacBook, get onto the laptop or anything.

I booted in safe mode and got to the OS X utilities screen and try to verify my disk (not gonna be home for a few days and can't remember be error) and I get an error and when I try to repair the disk it fails.

The Apple chat supervisor told me to try to back it up to my external hard drive but every time I try to it stops and the screen where it says the progress of it disappears.

 

[T5BRICK]

This is why you perform regular backups before something goes wrong.

Hopefully you can figure something out but your data is most likely gone.

 

[treekram]

If you can boot in safe mode (off of the HDD, not a optical disk, right?), at least some portion of your HDD is OK. From what you've written, it appears you lack a current (or any?) backup? If so, I would try to get another external drive (hopefully the computer will see and mount it) and copy the data that is most important to you in order of descending importance.

If you can get this far, I think you should be relieved.

Beyond this, you can try copying your entire home directory to another directory on your external drive. Yes, there will be duplicates, but that's OK. The problem in doing a copy operation of this sort is that if the first file the copy operation tries is bad, it won't go any further. There are ways to try to copy good files, skipping the bad files, but I don't know of any that don't require a fair amount of expertise or a quite a bit of work or both.

After you've tried to copy off your important files, you can try a NVRAM/SMC reset, although it's not likely to help.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

You can also try turning off the computer for at least a few hours and try again later to do a backup and disk repair.

 

[ssmed]

There are a number of alternative ways of looking at this:

1. Start in recovery mode and run Disk Utility (sounds like this has failed)
2. Get a copy of DiskWarrior on USB and see if you can rebuild the directories - this has worked a few times for me over the years when DU has failed
3. Use another Mac and using disk-mode copy the files over and then erase the disk and re-install just the OS and see if the disk issues remain
4. Consider using a commercial data recovery service if there is something really important on there

Sometimes you do lose everything, but you haven't tried very hard yet. Many people react thinking there is nothing that can be done, when a bit of work can often save a lot.

 

[Fishrrman]

Time to start looking for a new drive.

In the meantime, go to your backups for the data you need.

 

[npolly0212]

Thanks for all the generous replies everyone. I actually did a backup but was a while ago and was an idiot and haven't done one since.
Now when I try to backup it will quit after it loads a little so idk if anything even gets backed up

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote above:
"Now when I try to backup it will quit after it loads a little so idk if anything even gets backed up"

I'd suggest that you try either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper as your backup app in the future.

Both are highly reliable.

 

[npolly0212]

OP wrote above:
"Now when I try to backup it will quit after it loads a little so idk if anything even gets backed up"

I'd suggest that you try either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper as your backup app in the future.

Both are highly reliable.

I appreciate it. Are they both monthly things? Or just pay one time?

 

[Fishrrman]

CCC is FREE to download, and it's FREE to use with full-functionality for the first 30 days.

SuperDuper will work forever in "full clone" mode. What this means is you can always create a complete clone (everything gets re-copied) without having to register. If you wish to create "incremental" cloned backups, you need to register.

TIP:
Download CCC first.
In trial mode, it will ALSO create a clone of your recovery partition on your backup volume as well.

CCC is one of the finest pieces of Mac software "out there".

I sense that if you had a fully-bootable cloned backup before you experienced the problems you're now having, that things would be going much easier for you.
When the chips are down, there's NOTHING out there that beats having a complete clone that you can boot and run from...

 

[npolly0212]

CCC is FREE to download, and it's FREE to use with full-functionality for the first 30 days.

SuperDuper will work forever in "full clone" mode. What this means is you can always create a complete clone (everything gets re-copied) without having to register. If you wish to create "incremental" cloned backups, you need to register.

TIP:
Download CCC first.
In trial mode, it will ALSO create a clone of your recovery partition on your backup volume as well.

CCC is one of the finest pieces of Mac software "out there".

I sense that if you had a fully-bootable cloned backup before you experienced the problems you're now having, that things would be going much easier for you.
When the chips are down, there's NOTHING out there that beats having a complete clone that you can boot and run from...

I appreciate it. I guess ya live and learn. I will now be backing up my MacBook weekly after this experience.

Just hope I can somehow backup all my data and don't have to lose it somehow. Gonna try agin this weekend when I get home from Columbus back to sunny ole Columbia.

I am going to look at both and try to get both of them for myself

 

[BrettApple]

By far the easiest way IMO to get data off a failing or bad drive is to just slap it in a USB SATA dock/enclosure/cable and copy the folders you need the most off one by one. Such as documents and photos. Most of the time Finder will be able to do it, but sometimes you'll need extra software if the disk is that bad. And even then, some sectors can be completely trashed and make a single file unrecoverable (had a large parallels VM do that, not even CLI tools could recover that guy).

But most of the time it'll work just fine. Cloning the drive just takes longer, but should also do the job.

 

[npolly0212]

By far the easiest way IMO to get data off a failing or bad drive is to just slap it in a USB SATA dock/enclosure/cable and copy the folders you need the most off one by one. Such as documents and photos. Most of the time Finder will be able to do it, but sometimes you'll need extra software if the disk is that bad. And even then, some sectors can be completely trashed and make a single file unrecoverable (had a large parallels VM do that, not even CLI tools could recover that guy).

But most of the time it'll work just fine. Cloning the drive just takes longer, but should also do the job.

The whole cloning way to a external hd is what I have tried but it fails.

I have never encountered and error like this, so I'm not sure what you are talking about with the sub sata dock/enclosure/cable? Is it just a cable that connects over to another laptop to copy and save it?

 

[ssmed]

The whole cloning way to a external hd is what I have tried but it fails.

I have never encountered and error like this, so I'm not sure what you are talking about with the sub sata dock/enclosure/cable? Is it just a cable that connects over to another laptop to copy and save it?

Have you tried booting using another mac, disk or USB stick or and pulling the data off by that route, perhaps trying DiskWarrior as suggested above?

 

[MacCubed]

Remove the hard drive from your laptop, and order a USB SATA 2.5" Enclosure. Put the drive in this, plug it into another computer, and you can pull the desired files from it.

 

[npolly0212]

Well we tried for a while to do everything and we couldn't get it to work
Had to get a new hard drive out in (something about no mini fins or something in it?) which will be a lot better and they said it took them about 10-15 attempts of entering my password to access my data for some reason. But finally got it all done