2010 MacBook data recovery (Maverick?)

mjt

mjt

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So, long story short, my gf has just spent a week backing up all of her photos from the last 4 years onto her MacBook.

In her infinite wisdom, she decides to update to the latest OS last night.
After installing, the MacBook reboots a couple times with the Apple logo and the progress bar. She freaks out and manually powers down by holding the power button :rolleyes:

Now the MacBook shows the macOS Recovery screen. This is where I need your help. All I want is to get those pictures and videos off the HD. I couldn't care less about the computer or the OS. How can I do that? I know nothing about Macs or Mac recovery. She has never done a time machine backup, so I'm concerned that if I start messing with the disk utility or reinstall, we will lose everything.

Can I just rip out the HD, stick it in an enclosure and pull the photos via USB from my PC?

TIA!
 
Man of Honour
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Yes you should be able to mount the drive and get the information off. You’ll need specialist software on a PC though to read the data, a Mac should mount it straight away.
 

mjt

mjt

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Yes you should be able to mount the drive and get the information off. You’ll need specialist software on a PC though to read the data, a Mac should mount it straight away.
Great, thanks.
Called Apple Support who recommended I try re-installing OSX on an external HD first, so I'm doing that now.
Removing the HD is my backup option.
 

mjt

mjt

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Using the external HD worked like a charm. When I rebooted it without the external, the macbook had continued functioning on her profile with all data intact like nothing had ever happened :confused:

Maybe Macs aren't so bad after all ;)
 
Man of Honour
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So the internal (original) one was working?

There will be scripts that are called on in case of power cuts or other unforeseen circumstances during an OS upgrade.

Might be a good point for her to invest in a USB drive to put Time Machine backups onto.
 
Commissario
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Might be a good point for her to invest in a USB drive to put Time Machine backups onto.
I really think Time Machine is one of the things that makes macOS stand out. It's so simple to set up *click* and it does just work. I don't have to pull stuff out of it very often but when I need to, it's just there.
 

mjt

mjt

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So the internal (original) one was working?

There will be scripts that are called on in case of power cuts or other unforeseen circumstances during an OS upgrade.

Might be a good point for her to invest in a USB drive to put Time Machine backups onto.
Well I spent the whole of that morning backing up all her data onto an external HD, and then when her username loaded like nothing had happened, spent another few hours backing up using Time Machine.
So now she has the same data on 2 different partitions of an external HD :p
 
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