MacBook Pro Firewire/Grey Screen of Death

[tsa92red1]

Hello All:

So recently I was doing school work using Word and EPANET and my macbook suddenly started to freeze up. It would not allow me to restart, so I was forced to do a hard shut down. Upon starting it up, I was given the dreaded grey screen.

I tried safebooting it (get progress bar but after ~20% completion it stops and screen goes black) and also a disk repair from disk utilities (just spins at the verifying stage) as recommended by the online apple support.

After my visit with the geniuses today, they said that my hard drive was faulty and that it needs to be replaced. I believe they said that it was not mounting. Even their diagnostic cable would not recognize the computer. So yes, I went ahead and set up an appointment for it to be replaced.

My questions are however:

1) Is there any way to remove the current data on the drive? (Yes I was an idiot and never backed it up) I tried the Command+T upon start up and a firewire to another macbook of the same year and it would not show up as an external drive. I also tried the migration assistant route, and again the computer was not recognized. Any other ideas? Or am I just out of luck?

2) Is it normal for Apple to keep the old hard drive after replacing it so that they can send it to a warehouse? Seemed really odd to me.

Computer Specs:
* 2010 13" MacBook Pro 250 GB hard drive
* Mavericks OSX



I have been to other forums before, and I'm sure I've broken numerous rules but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again!

 

[DeltaMac]

...
My questions are however:

1) Is there any way to remove the current data on the drive? (Yes I was an idiot and never backed it up) I tried the Command+T upon start up and a firewire to another macbook of the same year and it would not show up as an external drive. I also tried the migration assistant route, and again the computer was not recognized. Any other ideas? Or am I just out of luck?

2) Is it normal for Apple to keep the old hard drive after replacing it so that they can send it to a warehouse? Seemed really odd to me.

1. Yes, but if the drive is not recognized, then that means you will need to get someone else to do it, such as a data recovery service like DriveSavers. Big bucks! If you want to try that, be prepared to spend a couple of thousand $ (yes, really!)
2. If Apple replaces the drive with an Apple service part, then the old drive is sent back to Apple to get rebuilt. If you buy the replacement drive, then you keep the old one, if you think you need to… No need to use Apple's service part if you are just replacing the hard drive.

 

[tsa92red1]

Thank you for the information.

I figured I would have to take it to someone in order for them to recover the files. Just mainly schoolwork from previous years so not really worth it for a large amounnt of money.

As for #2, even if you are buying a new piece of hardware from apple (not under warranty) they still take the old hard drive? Just seems weird that you are buying something and yet they are taking something else away from you, unless of course the new hard drive price is reduced due to taking the old HD for refurbishment? A local store in town said they might be able to mount the hard drive just to take the files off of it. Thats really why I want to know why I don't get it back.

If I was more computer savy I would definitely try to install it myself. How hard is it really? (engineering major so I'm good with tinkering with stuff) And would Apple continue to work on the MBP in the future should I run into more problems if I replaced it myself?