Mac Book Pro & tea spillage - recovering data

[Tad]

Hello,

Tea has been spilled on my wife's Mac Book Pro (2010/11 vintage). It's been sat in the airing cupboard for a couple of days but is not turning on so I'm guessing that it had it.

Do the good folks of Retrobike know any way of recovering data off the hard drive? Please, no one ask if it had been backed up.

I only have a PC running Windows 10 and another with Ubuntu.

I have a couple of hard drive caddies and I was thinking that I could pull the hard drive out, stick it in a caddy and see if I could get anything off it on my Windows/Ubuntu machine. Would this work or am I being a bit simple?

Cheers,

Tad

 

[legrandefromage]

take the hard drive out and connect it to another device.

 

[KDM]

That would be my first choice also as it's free and only costs time. It should be the same as treating it as an external device so may well come up okay

 

[ajm]

Re:

Yes hook it up to another computer as said - however you won't be likely to see much on it if you hook it up to a Windows PC due to the lack of suitable filesystem support; the Linux install (or another Mac) might be a better bet.

I would actually be surprised if the drive were badly damaged unless it was totally immersed in liquid, they tend to survive better than most other bits.

I have to say that Apple laptops seem to be the least resistant to any kind of moisture ingress - Apple also installed moisture detectors in many models to allow them to refuse warranty repairs on machines they suspect may have suffered spill damage.

 

[highlandsflyer]

Did they?

That sounds a little off, to be fair.

What number of moisture damaged are you seeing?

 

[mattr]

It's almost standard in most phones, tablets and laptops now. Every phone or tablet i've taken apart in the last ~10 years has had them. Laptops, it's about 50/50. Current laptop has 5 or 6 of them. All positioned strategically next to holes in the case, or under the keyboard.

My phone (that i dropped) had already triggered, despite having never been near liquid and not (yet) failing in any way shape or form. Comments to the manufacturer and supplier suggested that i must had got it wet without noticing. :roll:

 

[Tad]

take the hard drive out and connect it to another device.

Oh, if only it were that simple.

Righty, here is what I have learned for the benefit of other computer numpties like me who have done the same and want to give it a go.

You will need a hard drive caddy. I had a spare as I bought some cheap ones from ebay a while ago to make portable hard drives out of old lap top hard drives.

Remove the hard drive from your ruined mac, insert in to caddy.

It's not as simple as just plugging it in to another machine. It might be if you have another Mac, I didn't.

Plugging the new Mac caddy in to my Linux (Ubuntu) lap top I could read the drive, see all the files etc. However I couldn't open the user specific files as I "didn't have permission". I'm assuming that this is because I couldn't find a way of "signing in" to my wife's Mac with her password.

Oh what to do, what to do?

Plug it in to a Windows lap top and nothing. I didn't expect to get anything but hey ho, worth a go.

A smurfing teh interwebs later and I come across HFSExplorer. Brilliant, it's a free download, simple and intuitive to use though it doesn't look fancy. It allows you to explore all the folders and files on the Mac hard drive plugged in to the USB port of my Windows lap top and extract those that I need.

Crisis resolved.

Now what to do with a frazzled Macbook Pro?

 

[mattr]

Sell for spares or repair?
Lots of pictures with the case open.