Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: tived on August 07, 2009, 12:03:01 am

Title: rescue an older macbook
Post by: tived on August 07, 2009, 12:03:01 am

Hi guys,

we have an older macbook, the thick one, the battery had died and it won't stay on for long on mains power. How do I best and safest recover whats on it?


thanks guys

Henrik

PS: is it obvious that I am more of a PC guy :-0

Title: rescue an older macbook
Post by: francois on August 07, 2009, 03:34:33 am

Quote from: tived

…
we have an older macbook, the thick one, the battery had died and it won't stay on for long on mains power. How do I best and safest recover whats on it?
…

It's not clear to me why your MacBook can't be run with the power adapter. Anyway, if it's dead, you can remove the hard drive and find an empty hd enclosure or buy a universal HD connector ( something like: http://www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php (http://www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php) ). iFixit ( http://www.ifixit.com/ (http://www.ifixit.com/) ) has repair guides that you can download (PDF format).

If you can power up your Mac and run it with a power adapter, then you can copy its content either to another drive via USB/Firewire or via the network to another Mac/PC (it'll be slow).

Give us more info about your setup.

Title: rescue an older macbook
Post by: Ken Bennett on August 07, 2009, 07:56:09 am

Agreed with Francois, the easiest and safest method would be to remove the hard drive and put it in an external casing, then just mount it to another Mac as an external drive and start copying the data.

If you want to use all the apps and data as-is from the old machine, you should be able to tell the new Mac to copy those from the old one and put them in all the right places. In the old days we did this with a Firewire cable to the old Mac, but if your power is sketchy you'll want to try the external drive method.

Title: rescue an older macbook
Post by: Tgrain on August 08, 2009, 02:52:16 am

Try the genius bar at your apple store first.  I had trouble with my aging powerbook and they ran extensive diagnostics on it tried to reinstall the system software.  Turned out I needed a new hard drive, so they backed up my entire system and then replaced my hardrive, replaced my broken dvd player and fixed my latch for about $300.

Title: rescue an older macbook
Post by: francois on August 08, 2009, 06:27:38 am

Quote from: Tgrain

Try the genius bar at your apple store first.  I had trouble with my aging powerbook and they ran extensive diagnostics on it tried to reinstall the system software.  Turned out I needed a new hard drive, so they backed up my entire system and then replaced my hardrive, replaced my broken dvd player and fixed my latch for about $300.

It's a good suggestion but I'm not sure that Tived has access to an Apple Store in Western Australia.