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zoey26

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 5, 2017
1
0
Hello,

I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right place - so hopefully I am or someone can redirect me!

About a month ago I stupidly stood on the right hand corner of my Macbook Pro... Directly on top of where the hard drive can be found! I straight away opened my mac and I'd completely cracked the glass on my Mac, which is absolutely devastating to me. I've had this Mac since early 2012 and never had one issue or scratch on it.

My Mac was sleeping at the time that this happened, so when I opened up the screen to see if there was any damage my Mac turned on and showed me the login page. Luckily I hadn't damaged the LCD but I was so annoyed that I'd smashed the glass I shut my laptop screen down. About 5 minutes later I heard my Mac turn itself off. Didn't really think a lot of it at the time.

The next morning I tried to turn my Mac on and I was getting the white screen with the grey Apple and that's about as far as it'd get. I'd then get black boxes with a lot of writing come up and the Mac would then restart itself - it stayed in this loop and I never got any further. Tried to reset the NRAM etc with no luck so took it in to a genius bar.

As my Mac was discontinued in June/July this year (it's a late 2011 15" MacBook Pro) Apple told me they would not replace my screen or try to help me with any issues. The guy ran diagnostics on it and everything came back fine bar the hard drive.

I've now replaced the hard drive but I really want to get photos I have off the old hard drive if possible. Shortly before this happened I moved about 3 years worth of photos of really important things to me and stupidly, I know, I did not back this data up. Live and learn I guess!

I've bought an external hard drive case and plugged my old hard drive in to it. The external hard drive recognises it and boots up but my Mac itself does not recognise it in either finder nor disk utility. There is no clicking noises from my hard drive (I've opened it up to check the arm isn't stuck) and there does not seem to be any internal or external damage to the hard drive. It's almost completely silent.

Does anyone have any recommendations on how to try and get this recognised? If the hard drive is booting up but is not being recognised is this not good news? :(

Any ideas anyone has would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

Zoey
 

ZapNZs

macrumors 68020
Jan 23, 2017
2,310
1,158
Could you please elaborate on this:

The external hard drive recognises it and boots up but my Mac itself does not recognise it in either finder nor disk utility. There is no clicking noises from my hard drive (I've opened it up to check the arm isn't stuck) and there does not seem to be any internal or external damage to the hard drive. It's almost completely silent.

Do you mean you physically opened the covering of the drive where you could see the actual read/write arm?
 
Last edited:

simonsi

Contributor
Jan 3, 2014
4,851
735
Auckland
If it wasn't bust before it probably is now, there is a reason these are assembled in clean rooms. As it wasn't clicking I'd assume it had died when you trod on it though, likely it could show you the login screen as that was loaded, it subsequently had to access disk after you had closed it and that is when you heard it shutdown.

Dead drives rarely give back any data. "Booting" refers to loading the OS from that drive, what you are seeing sounds like just the electronic coming ready in the USB drive case, not the drive itself.
 
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