Data Recovery

hello all,

i'm currently in the process of repairing/upgrading a macbook pro for a friend of mine. this is the model:

MacBook Pro (Mid 2007, 2.4/2.2GHz) - Technical Specifications

(15.4", 2.2 ghz)

she had been having some problems with it that the Genius bar wasn't able to fix right away, and they said they would have to ship it, so i said i would take a look at it.

i tried booting it up, and the apple logo appeared, but after a while the spinning progress meter just froze. if i left it alone for some more it would go to sleep. when i tried to wake it up, nothing would happen, so i would have to hold down the power button to power it off completely.
also, whenever i first powered it on, the hard drive made some funny noises and a few clicking sounds.

using an online guide, i managed to enter this menu:



and i ran fsck -fy



after which, it froze and refused to do anything else after that last line. it was also unresponsive to keystrokes from that point.


following an online guide at ifixit.com, i've managed to take out the hard drive in hopes of recovering the data.








my next step is to somehow transfer all the data from this hard drive. I currently have it in a 2.5" hard drive enclosure. When i plugged it in to the USB port to my windows laptop, i wasn't really expecting anything to happen but had to try anyway. I was thinking since it's a mac drive, only another macbook or mac desktop would be able to recognize it. I have a couple other friends who would let me use their macbooks, and I also have another external HD available to transfer the data to.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should go about recovering this data? Any specific software / methods i should use?

Thanks for the help.

thanks for the many replies offering advice.

i've solved the problem, y'all were an amazing source of help. thanks again.

The folks who post in these forums offer assistance as volunteers not paid technical support personnel. Also, the information you requested is readily available from on line sources and guides. A little bit of Googling would have gotten you an answer.

Your sarcastic attitude will certainly not help you to get assistance in the future whether it be here or elsewhere. Good luck and thanks for using our forums.

You will need another Mac or replace the HDD, as I think that is want the major problem is, then reload the OS and programs on it, that is the owner has the original discs that came with the system (which in the Mac world seem very unlikely because most Mac users think Mac never brake down so why do I need to keep these discs).

You can also reassemble it and reload the OS on an externally connected USB drive and see if it boots off that and runs OK. If it does then you know it is the HDD that is failing.