Best data recovery options for a possibly damaged laptop

[ramuman]

A laptop belonging to a member of our group was involved in a car accident in which he passed away last week. It was very sobering news, but moving forward, the adviser wants to retrieve the research data off the hard drive, for which we have the family's permission.

So details:

- It was a unibody MacBook with a mechanical HD
- The computer appears intact, but we don't want to power it on and risk damaging the platters
- We've contacted our IT folks and are waiting on a reply
- There is probably an OS X password on there, which only he likely knew

What are some options to safely recover the data? The group would value it enough to get sent out for recovery as a last resort (e.g. DriveSavers).

 

[T_Yamamoto]

I'm sure you can yank out the hard drive. See if its safe.

Then maybe hook it up to a sata to USB then connect to a computer and pull the contents?

 

[ramuman]

I'm sure you can yank out the hard drive. See if its safe.

Then maybe hook it up to a sata to USB then connect to a computer and pull the contents?

We have access to the drive obviously, but we don't want to power it on if the heads are in contact with the platters or the bearings are unbalanced. I don't know if there's a way to run SMART or find the status of the drive before the spindle motor turns on.

 

[Gunbuster]

Your choices are to find your balls and hook it up to a USB adapter or send it off to Ontrack with a check for $3000.

 

[ramuman]

Your choices are to find your balls and hook it up to a USB adapter or send it off to Ontrack with a check for $3000.

Decided to go with DriveSavers. The data is irreplaceable.

 

[mfenn]

And this is why you do not keep the only copy of critical data on somebody's laptop. What if it had been stolen? It sounds like you would be screwed in that case.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You can reset an admin password with an OS X boot disk.

You probably didn't need to send it to Drivesavers, but hey, if it's really irreplaceable, then better safe than sorry.