Backing Up Hard Drive

I need to ship my Mac Book to get repaired I have two issues, the first problem is that I did not backup all of my pictures and the second is that my laptop will not power on. I am guessing that I need to take the hard drive out and set up as a portable hard drive and then transfer everything off. I am open to any suggestions or ideas. Either post here or email me at [email protected].

I tried searching this site but found nothing.

Also please do not bother wasting your time by telling me I should have backed up my hard drive, I am well aware of that.

Thank you in advance for your time and help

You guessed right. Buy an enclosure for the drive (SATA) and then attach it to another Mac and copy your photos and whatever else you need off the drive before sending the machine out for repairs. You might want to clone the entire drive just as a precaution. Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper can be used to clone the drive. (You'll need an additional external hard drive to do the cloning to.)

I'll second cloning the drive. That should preserve everything and allow you to get things back the way you like with relative ease.

Cloning

Thank you for your replies.

Is there a way to take the HD and make it external and then hook it up to my other MAC and hook up an additional blank HD and use time machine to back up the "laptop HD" to the "blank external'?

Thanks again

You could do that. Time Machine does not back up external drives by default but you can tell it to do so by adjusting its preferences. You would need to remove your drive and put it into some type of external enclosure. I have several drives around so I am using Thermaltake BlacX ST0005U Hard Drive Dock - 2.5/3.5 SATA to USB 2.0, eSATA at TigerDirect.com at the moment. Good for when you need to quickly connect a drive temporarily and swap to a different drive later.