MacBook Pro won’t boot or mount.

Hello all,

To start, I have a mid-2010 15” MacBook Pro. Yesterday, I turned it on and noticed that an external hard drive was showing as being mounted even though it wasn’t. When I clicked eject to attempt to remove the icon from my desktop, I got the color wheel and the computer wasn’t responding to anything. I turned it off via the power button and attempted to restart it. However, it would shut itself off about 1/3 of the way through the progress bar under the Apple logo. Unfortunately, I never made a copy to Time Machine or an external HD.

Tried rebooting into Recovery mode and it automatically did Internet Recovery. After that was finished, I checked Disk Utility. My Macintosh HD is listed but is greyed out however, and it will not mount. I tried mounting it using Terminal and that didn’t work either.

Running First Aid through Disk Utility gives me the following:

Repairing file system.

Volume is already unmounted.

Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk0s2

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Invalid key length

The volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely.

File system check exit code is 8.

Restoring the original state found as unmounted.

File system verify or repair failed.

Operation failed...

With a message at the top that says I should back up the data on this volume. Trying to mount through terminal gives me this:

diskutil mount /dev/disk0s2

Volume on disk0s2 failed to mount

If the volume is damaged, try the read0nly option

Running fsck -fy in single user mode produced the following:

fsck -fy

/dev/rdisk0s2

Root file system

Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-285)

Checking Journaled HFS Plus Volume

The volume name is Macintosh HD

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Invalid key length

(4, 825)

The volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely.

So I understand my hard drive is probably dead, but I want to recover some files from it if possible before getting a new computer. (I was already planning on getting a new one soon. The battery is on its last legs as well.) Since my drive won’t mount or boot, is the only way to do this through a software program that I boot via CD?

Thanks.