Old Macbook to New

[Forkie]

Hi,

This is my first post and am hoping for a little guidance!

Our old Macbook had a battle with a glass of red wine and lost. The Macbook is dead, but on opening by an Apple Genius in the Apple Store, found the hard drive has escaped a coating of sticky wine and our files should be safe.

My question is, how can we transfer the data from the old Macbook hard drive to the new one when the old Macbook will no longer switch on? Is there a way to connect the old hard drive to the new Macbook and take the files we want from it?

We don't want to replace the new hard drive with the old one, but just put some of the files (photos, music, University stuff, etc.) onto the new Macbook.

Is there a way to do this without the need for a data recovery service?

Many thanks for any help.



P.S. I have looked for threads that answer this problem, but didn't quite find what I was looking for. Apologies if I haven't looked hard enough!

 

[spinnerlys]

Target Disk Mode if you have Firewire.

If not, put the old HDD into a 2.5" HDD enclosure for S-ATA HDDs and connect it via USB to your new Mac, then use the Migration Assistant.

Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6: How to use Migration Assistant to transfer files from another Mac

Those enclosures should cost around 10 to 20 €.

 

[nemE]

Target Disk Mode won't work if the computer can't turn on full-stop.

Even if you don't use the Migration Assistant, you'll still be able to move files over from the old drive using the caddy/enclosure that spinnerlys is talking about.

Use the instructions from here to get the hard drive out (I'm assuming your old MacBook was one of the Non-Unibody ones):
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/macbook_13inch_harddrive_diy.pdf

Getting the drive into the caddy/enclosure should be a no-brainer and shouldn't take anything more than 2 minutes.

Of course you can always format the old drive afterwards and use it as external storage

 

[Forkie]

Thank you guys, that's really helpful!