Chosen Solution

A funeral director dropped my MacBook Pro and it never worked since. I have so many precious irreplaceable photos and iMovies on it. Is it possible to send it in to a specialist to have it transferred? The Apple Store said they couldn’t do it.

Is the system not responding at all? Or, has the drive its self failed? Sometimes we can still get the system to startup enough so we can recover the data. You’ll need a second mac (one that has a FireWire port) to try to gain access to your systems drive using Target Disk Mode. Here we are starting the system up and pressing the T Key to enter into this special condition. Once its in this state we can treat your system as if it where an external drive connecting it via a FireWire cable to your other system. Then you can just copy off your stuff. Reference: How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode If that doesn’t work you can take your drive out and using a SATA to USB adapter cable connect it to your other system StarTech 2.5" SATA to USB adapter cable If neither of these methods work you’ll need to ship your drive to a data recovery service to fix your drive enough so the data can be recovered. Drive Savers. Depending on the how bad the drive is damaged they may not be able to recover everything and I’ll warn you it is not cheap! Once you get your stuff recovered and you have a new system you will want to make sure you have an external backup solution so you don’t need to go this far.

Edit: Removed post because I thought this was one of the MacBooks that come with SSDs.