My son passed away and I need to get his pics from a non working HDD.

Take it to a nearby data recovery service; these can charge hundreds or thousands of dollars.

(125143)

You may wish to check out DriveSavers.

Condolences on the loss of your son.

Comdolences on your son.

The prices I was quoted were $500-$1200 to extract the data off a dead hard drive. Means removing the platen & dropping it onto a new drive with a working head, in a cleanroom environment & copying onto another media. I did not proceed to do so, therefore I cannot recommend a service. I would consider Seagate for advice, however. (In my case, it was a Seagate drive that I crashed & I know they do good work).

It really seems to me that this is exorbitant for cost, but in your case it would be worth it.

sorry to hear about the loss of your son. I haven't used any data rescue services, but they could be good. I've used a program called DataRescue 3 for when my hard drive crashed, I diidn't have a backup system in place, no backup at all, and my hard drive didn't mount and wasn't responding. It got all of my old stuff off of the hard drive, thus saving my bacon. You may want to consider that option.

good luck to you

JB

Johnb-one brought up a good point:

Are you sure you have a hardware crash on the computer?

I assumed it from what you wrote & the early answer you received, but if this was a progressive slowdown & the drive is still spinning (you’d probably hear some nasty stuff going on if the head were contacting the platen, or it would not be spinning).

I would take it to an Apple store, if you have one available to you --> to see what they might say, or certainly contact Apple support before dropping big money to have the data extracted by a service, just in case it isn’t a hardware crash. Get the best expert available to address it vs the first person who walks up.

While you get some great answers on here, there are no warranties.

Therefore, its best to use anything that sounds iffy, as food for thought & to frame your options before seeking expert help.

Further, you probably didn’t need to remove the drive - could have accessed it from the 2nd Mac via target mode, if it is accessible at all.

So sorry to hear about the loss of your son.

" I just got off the phone with drivesavers and Im looking at $700-$2700..."

That seems really high. It used to be that high but I thought it had come down.

" I removed the drive from the computer and put it in an enclosure and connected it to another mac. Unfortunately its not recognizing the drive at all. I've done this with several computers all of which are not able to see the drive."

I've used Data Rescue II for quite a while now. What I have found is that if the drive would spin up Data Rescue II would be able to retrieve data from it. The new version is DR IV which is higher rated.

http://www.prosofteng.com/datarescue4/

You can download a free trial here:

http://www.prosofteng.com/datarescue4/datarescuedemo/

Visiting the day's date.