Macbook A1278 Stuck on Apple Logo Progress Bar - Overcurrent Detected with Port Status 0x4000

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

I am trying to help fix a friends Mackbook A1278. It turns on, chimes and then the Apple Logo appears and then the progress bar appears and slowly, very slowly moves to about 80% and just stays there.
I tried restting VRAM and SMC and then tried Safe Mode, no joy, Recovery Mode does not work, Internet Recovery Mode will not show up my SSID to connect to.
I then tried CMD +V to start in verbose mode to see the output, its seems that the boot stalls with the following warning being repeated:

000032.259671 PRT3@fa130000: AppleUSBHostPort::interruptOccured: overcurrent detected with port status 0x4000, localSimulatedInterrupts =0x0

I only found a couple of references to this on the internet, relating to a damaged USB port requiring a Logic Board replacement?

Although they would like a working Mac back, my friend is mainly interested about saving their photos! I could remove the Hard Drive and try putting it into an external enclosure, but if they have saved their photos in iPhoto of Photo how can we extract them?

Any help would be appreciated

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Ok so no replies on this one?

I have just removed the Hard Drive and installed it into a USB external enclosure, it spins up but the activity light starts to flash and keeps flashing. I opened Disk Utility and with the external drive plugged in although it appears as a device the main partition is ghosted and causes Disk Utility to hang, when I pull the USB cable out Disk Utility quits.

I have just opened up Disk Drill and the Hard Drive appears as ASMT 2105 and the main partition "Untitled". I have clicked on recover and Disk Drill is attempting to Rebuild HFS+ catalog file?

Here is the output from Terminal using "diskutil list":

I also managed to perform First Aid in Disk Utility on the device Macintosh HD and it finished saying everything was OK. Here is the pic:

But the Apple Partition within Macintosh HD is ghosted:

The Mac itself appears to be OK as I put one of my old Apple HDDs in it and after a short period it booted up fine:

Also when trying to access the ghosted partition Disk Utility Hangs, until I remove the External USB Enclosure:

Any help with how to recover data or fix this HDD would be appreciated.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Anyone?