Hard drive on my Macbook crashed, how do I retrieve my photos?

P

Pearl

New member
Please don't yell at me and tell me I should have backed it up. Obviously I know that now and obviously I'm no computer wiz. I have four years of photos of my son on iPhoto and they are the only thing I care about getting back. Stupidly I thought that iPhoto was like Flikr and stored your photos online. Guess I was wrong huh? Any ideas? I took it to a shop already and he said he could install the new hard drive for $130 but that didn't include retrieving data from the old one. They told me they could refer me to some one who does that kind of thing...anyone know what that might cost me? I live in Vancouver Washington (across the river from Portland Oregon)
Talked to the repair guy, he says the hard drive needs to be replaced. I can't even boot it up. Now what?
Looks like I need data recovery for my Macbook...can anyone recommend somewhere decent in the Portland area? I just need to recover my Users Folder.
 
You need to boot yer MAC into another operating system, such as Ubuntu linux which runs off of the disk image. From there, you should be able to access the files on the HDD, and then backit up to a USB drive or something. If Linux can't recognize the HDD or can't retreieve the files from it, you have to pay for data recovery. At least that's what I would do.
 
find yourself an external enclosure for the old hard drive, doesn't need to be something fancy, just something that matches the connection of the hard drive. make sure you have your new hard drive loaded with the operating system and ready for when you need to retrieve the photo's. Take your old hard drive and place it in the freezer. Let it sit for a few hours and then place it in the external enclosure. you'll have a decent amount of time to retrieve your old files but be quick. I'm assuming the old hard drive completely failed, and that this is a mechanical error, so this will be your one and only shot at retrieving your old files. after you perform your back up of the old files, the hard drive will more than likely not work at all.

If it was just an operating system error, follow the same steps with buying the external enclosure, but ignore the freezing of the hard drive section. connect your old hard drive and find your files and you should be set
 
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