Last night my Macbook just inexplicably broke, although I don't really wanna spend any more money on a new Laptop (yes Laptop) Apple has slowly put me off the more of their tech I use. Oh well, no big deal, I was just looking for an excuse. What is a big deal however is that despite some performance issues, my Macbook at least worked, so it hasn't been backed up in months. So my question to you guys is, can I get my personal files off it without booting it up? Or have I lost everything?
Well I get the Apple logo, it tells me to put in my password, I see my home screen. Everything as normal. Then I just get a blank blue screen that flashes, sometimes the loading cog shows up but that soon leaves. And that's it.
Man, if anyone from your friends has macbook or HDD-pouch, you can just pull out your HDD and put in another macbook and then copy all files.
Is taking the harddrive out just the same as in a laptop? I've cased my old laptop harddrive to use as an external, but I was worried about taking my Mac apart for fear of it being totally alien.
You don't need to physically remove the hard drive. If you have another Mac and a firewire cable handy, you can start up in target disk mode. Alternately, you can boot into a Linux live disc (Knoppix, for example) and copy files to an external that way.
The fact that you can type in your password means that your hard drive hasn't crashed: your machine is just failing to complete the boot process. You could do what starjimstar recommends and copy your files to a different machine, but it's likely that thenl problem is a corrupted extension and you could access your machine by booting in safe mode (I think you hold down the spacebar, but don't quote me on that -- you can just google "Mac safe mode"). If that doesn't work, try to boot from your install disk and run disk first aid. Good luck.
Hold shift for safe mode and command+R for Lion's recovery mode. And if you put install disc #1 (that came with your machine) in the optical drive and hold D at launch, you can access the Apple hardware test.
Thanks guys, I'll try booting it into safemode. But I've had this macbook for almost three years, I have no idea where the stuff that came with it has gone...
