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Random 2009 Macbook Pro Hard Drive Failure

C

Chakra-X

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 8, 2010
3
0
Hello, my girlfriend owns a mid 2009 Macbook Pro and was working on a college project in Photoshop when the computer froze. She proceeded to turn it off by holding the power button and when she attempted to start it back up, it would not even get past the white boot up screen (no Apple logo appears either).

She took it to our college's "Academic Computing" department where they attempted to get her data off via FireWre Target Disk Mode but they were unable to do it. I tried it myself by connecting it to my Macbook Pro but it would not get past the large bouncing FireWire symbol.

She took it to a nearby Apple certified store, Springboard, and they told her they opened up the laptop and that she had a hard drive failure and it would cost $1,800 to retrieve the data. Unfortunately she never did a back up so all of her projects, paid-for Itunes music, and photographs will be lost.

It seems the only command her laptop responds to is when I attempt to reset the PRAM by holding COMMAND+OPTION+P+R. Single user mode does not work and neither does safe boot mode. I tried to put in a recovery disc and it spins the disc but now I can not eject it.

Is there any other solution to this or will she either have to pay the data recovery amount or just get a new hard drive and not have her data? She's never dropped it before and it is relatively new, so I do not see how a program crash can destroy her hard drive.
 
Suddenly the $150 I spent on my backup drive doesn't seem so bad.

How important is her data? Have you tried DiskWarrior to repair the disk? It's been known to work some magic. But if the drive is completely dead there isn't much you can do.
 
MBHockey said:
Suddenly the $150 I spent on my backup drive doesn't seem so bad.

How important is her data? Have you tried DiskWarrior to repair the disk? It's been known to work some magic. But if the drive is completely dead there isn't much you can do.
Click to expand...


Yes I have heard of some miracles created by DiskWarrior, but I looked in to it and it seems like people would log on to a different hard drive to repair the broken one. I do not know how to do this if I can not access her laptop via Target Disk mode.

Her data consists of most of her work from college (we both attend art school so hers are like graphic design/video projects) and I believe it holds family pictures as well.
 
Chakra-X said:
Yes I have heard of some miracles created by DiskWarrior, but I looked in to it and it seems like people would log on to a different hard drive to repair the broken one. I do not know how to do this if I can not access her laptop via Target Disk mode.

Her data consists of most of her work from college (we both attend art school so hers are like graphic design/video projects) and I believe it holds family pictures as well.
Click to expand...

You'd have to buy DiskWarrior and it comes with a boot disc that you would run it from. You'd turn on her computer, insert the disc, and then the computer would boot to the DiskWarrior disc. You would run DiskWarrior from there. It's not cheap, but it would save a lot of money if it worked ($100 vs $1800).

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

The thing is, i'm not at all convinced whatever software they use for the $1800 data recovery is any better or any different from what DiskWarrior does.
 
I would give the "target disk mode" method another shot. I nuked my imac about two days ago and used target disk mode.

I never made it past the firewire symbol too, but what happened was the imacs hard disk mounted onto my MBP like an external drive, so I was still able to pull all the important stuff off before re-installing OS X.
 
Good catch, Ride. I didn't notice that in his original post.

Chakra-X, that is normal behavior for FireWire target disk mode. Did you have it connected to another Mac with a firewire cable? The bouncing FireWire logo means the disk from that computer should be mounted on the Mac that it is hooked up to as an external drive. It should just show up on the desktop of the working Mac.

Please check that again before you think about spending money on any type of recovery software!
 
Ride9650 said:
I would give the "target disk mode" method another shot. I nuked my imac about two days ago and used target disk mode.

I never made it past the firewire symbol too, but what happened was the imacs hard disk mounted onto my MBP like an external drive, so I was still able to pull all the important stuff off before re-installing OS X.
Click to expand...

Could you expand on this please? If you never got past the firewire symbol, how were you able to access it like an external hard drive? I tried it again last night and let it go over night and it still had the bouncing FireWire symbol. Did you do an extra step after this or did the target disk mode happen to work for you the second time around?

By the way, thank you very much for the speedy replies. Much appreciated.
 
Chakra-X said:
Could you expand on this please? If you never got past the firewire symbol, how were you able to access it like an external hard drive? I tried it again last night and let it go over night and it still had the bouncing FireWire symbol. Did you do an extra step after this or did the target disk mode happen to work for you the second time around?

By the way, thank you very much for the speedy replies. Much appreciated.
Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure you're understanding how target disk mode works. You need two Macs and a firewire cable.

1) Place two Macs next to each other and turn off the one with the bad hard drive. The one that is working properly can stay on.

2) Connect the two Macs with a firewire cable

3) Turn on the Mac with the bad hard drive and immediately hold down T until the firewire logo appears and is moving around the screen. This is all you need to do with the bad Mac.

4) Now go over to the good Mac and you should see the hard drive from the bad Mac now mounted on the desktop. Double click it and see if you can copy files off of it onto the good Mac.

Here's Apple's instructions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661
 
MBHockey said:
I'm not quite sure you're understanding how target disk mode works. You need two Macs and a firewire cable.

1) Place two Macs next to each other and turn off the one with the bad hard drive. The one that is working properly can stay on.

2) Connect the two Macs with a firewire cable

3) Turn on the Mac with the bad hard drive and immediately hold down T until the firewire logo appears and is moving around the screen. This is all you need to do with the bad Mac.

4) Now go over to the good Mac and you should see the hard drive from the bad Mac now mounted on the desktop. Double click it and see if you can copy files off of it onto the good Mac.

Here's Apple's instructions:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1661
Click to expand...

exactly what I did.
Sorry I wasn't more clear Chakra I just assumed at that point after seeing my post that you had read/re-read the directions
 
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