Can I retrieve data from crashed hard drive on MacBook Pro?

Peaceluvr,

contact a data recovery service, and buy yourself an external drive to function as a Time Machine backup, so that in the future you won’t have to contact a data recovery service the next time that you have a hard disk that crashes.

You can always try...

...you can use a tool such as Date Rescue 3 or DiskWarrior to try to retrieve files. If that doesn't work then you'll have to use a specialized service.

Clinton

Peaceluvr,

since I don’t know where on the planet you’re located, I’m almost certainly unaware of the data recovery services in your area. It’s possible for data recovery services to recover data from dead drives, but it depends partially upon skill (the ability of the data recoverers) and partially upon luck (whether your data are on readable sectors of the disk or not).

Will a data recovery software work with a failed hard drive

With the two that I'm familiar with (noted above) the software tries to, at least temporarily, 'fix' the drive so that data can be recovered.

I've no idea what data recovery services would charge - I've seen some advertise for thousands of dollars for major recovery. You'll just have to shop around for those services - or take a chance with either of the $100 packages first.

Clinton

First, get yourself an External Enclosure and a new drive that can be used eventually to place inside your MacBook.

Install Mac OS X on the new External and Boot from it. Now your Mac is operating again.

Later, you can swap the new drive with the old drive and get back your portability.

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Mac OS X has over 250,000 files in it. Booting is very complex. Just reading a few files off your old drive may be relatively easy -- or may be completely impossible.

If you have a spare drive, programs like DataRescue may be able to grab a few files off it -- or maybe not.

If Apple says the disk drive has failed, the only way I know to recover anything from is to send it to a data recovery service. Expect to pay for their services like $$$$.

Allan

Do you mean the hard drive is mechanically broken for sure? It's not a data corruption issue that is causing a problem with starting up the Mac, but maybe not be a bad mechanism?

If the drive is definitely broken, there are businesses that specialize in recovering data from bad hard drives. For example

http://www.drivesaverdatarecovery.com/ (I always saw their booth at MacWorld Expos...)

The cost of such services is usually high.

cannot get into the computer

So that probably means the hard drive in question is the internal drive? If you don't know for sure that the hard drive is physically broken, you can try starting up using your Mac OS X installation disc. Insert disc in optical drive and start up with the C key held down. When you get to Installer's screen, go up to the menu bar and run Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. Does the internal drive appear in the Disk Utility sidebar?

Alternately, if you have another Mac (that has FireWire), you can try starting the Mac with the problem in FireWire Target Disk Mode,

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

Connect the "target" Mac to the other Mac (running normally) using a FireWire cable. Run Disk Utility on that Mac. Does the hard drive of the Mac in FireWire Target Disk Mode appear in the sidebar?

If you can get the internal drive to appear in Disk Utility, you may be able to run Repair Disk on the First Aid tab. There are also third-party utilities, such as TechTool Pro (Micromat), Drive Genius (Prosoft), and Disk Warrior (Alsoft), that may be able to fix (or at least recover data from) the hard drive.