HD recovery

Hi! I am trying to help a friend. She has a mac laptop that is less than two years old and the hard drive went bad. She did not back up her files and desperately needs them. Please don't hate me for this but I have a PC. I've used macs but have never been trained in repair of macs at school. Anyway, can you take out the HD put it in an external enclosure to use as a USB to try to recover her files? I did this last year in my laptop but I want to make sure that it works the same in her mac before I try to help and make it worse.

If you know anywhere that gives step-by-step instructions, that would be great too. We do not live close so I have to try to help her with great detail of what she needs to do.

Thanks so much! It is very appreciated!

Angie

The procedure is the same as with your PC. She needs to either purchase an external USB carrier case (SATA, 2.5") or an adapter so she can hook the drive to a working Mac and see if the data is intact. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it does not. Depends on what's wrong with the drive.

If there's someone she knows who lives close by and owns a Mac, she might try hooking her Mac to their Mac via a firewire cable and then booting in target mode. That would allow the working Mac to access the hard drive on her Mac and possibly copy her data off it.

See this Apple KB article which explains how. Link

If she really needs that data and the above methods fail, she can try using specialized software to extract the data from the bad hard drive. However, such software is usually expensive. See this Link for "Data Rescue II".

Post back if you need additional info or assistance.

Regards.