HDD Trouble: Dead drive? Or dead cable? Looking in the wrong place? (Apple)

Christopher Ciavs

Reputable
Feb 21, 2015
7
0
4,510
So my 2011 MacBook Pro died suddenly and upon messing with it (taking the back off, putting it in the fridge (not a joke), and just short of shaking it to bits) it worked SOMETIMES but only until attempting to access the files (i.e for about 20 seconds). 9/10 times the computer would start with the typical "?" folder icon. So I took the drive out which spins fine, and put it in my Win10 machine and the drive was not found. However upon looking in BIOS it is seen as an "Apple 500gb -bla bla bla- drive. I tried using HSFexplorer to no avail. I can't seem to access the drive anywhere. Any ideas?
 
Solution
Hey there, Christopher.

Basically putting the whole laptop in the freezer is not a good idea. I wouldn't even recommend it for the HDD alone, as well.
As for the hard drive in particular - if it's in a good condition, you could try with a different 3rd party program which can read HFS+ file system, to see if you have the same results. If that doesn't help, perhaps you should try to find a Mac and try the drive with it, to see if its properly recognized and if you can try out some data recovery programs. If you don't have that option, or if you still don't get any positive results, you might have to go for a professional solution, such as a data recovery company, if you value the data on the HDD.
Unfortunately, the fact that the drive...
Hey there, Christopher.

Basically putting the whole laptop in the freezer is not a good idea. I wouldn't even recommend it for the HDD alone, as well.
As for the hard drive in particular - if it's in a good condition, you could try with a different 3rd party program which can read HFS+ file system, to see if you have the same results. If that doesn't help, perhaps you should try to find a Mac and try the drive with it, to see if its properly recognized and if you can try out some data recovery programs. If you don't have that option, or if you still don't get any positive results, you might have to go for a professional solution, such as a data recovery company, if you value the data on the HDD.
Unfortunately, the fact that the drive is spinning doesn't mean that it's in a good condition. It still might have errors or bad sectors, but you'd have to test it with an HDD diagnostics tool in order for you to find out. Although I should warn you, that if the drive has physical damage of some sort, it's quite for you to make the situation worse, after scanning it. So keep that in mind if you have data you wish to recover.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
Solution