My partner recently had some water damage to her MacBook (A1425), rendering it completely unresponsive. It turns out her backups were not working either.

On the Macbook, nothing happens when pressing the power button, trickery with shift + ctrl + power doesn’t help, it seems completely dead. When the charger is connected no light appears on the charger. So I think it’s safe to assume it is an ex-mac; it has seized to be. However, the files are of some importance.

When researching online, it seems there are two possible options. One is to try to get hold of a thunderbolt cable and booting it in target mode while connected to another Mac; the other is to buy a hard drive enclosure, remove the hard drive and put it inside, and access from another computer.

From what I’ve read, the latter is my best bet. First, it might be cheaper than buying a thunderbolt cable; second, it doesn’t depend on as many components inside the Mac not being damaged; third, it would leave us with an external hard drive.

However, this leaves me with a few questions, as I am not great with computers and especially illiterate with Macs.

  1. How can I know if an enclosure is compatible with the hard drive?

  2. It seems to me this model has two hard drives. Would the same enclosure work on both, or do I need to get two different ones?

  3. I am not a great tech mechanic, but I did successfully change the battery of a glued together android phone once, and I used to change the parts of desktop computers back in the day. Would hard drive removal be trivial?

  4. Once removed and in the enclosure, are files encrypted? How could they be accessed from another computer, and would such access only work from another Mac? I use Linux, it would be useful to know if I need to borrow a Mac to retrieve the files.

Sorry for the lengthy call for tech support, and thank you in advance for any help!

Edit: Thank you all so much for the amazing help!

For anyone who might arrive from searching the Internet:
The main lesson might be to be careful when buying an external box for the hard drive of these generations of Macbooks. The hard drive used in the 2012 Macbook Pro with retina is different from the one used in the Macbook air, regular Macbook, or regular Mac from the same year, and different from SSDs used in the end of 2013 and onwards. If your Macbook is from 2013, count the pins.

I ended up buying the OWC Envoy Pro s suggested by @bobsuruncle as I found it available with relatively short shipping time to where I am in Europe; Sintech also has a model that might be a little cheaper. External boxes for these hard drives don’t come cheap, unfortunately.

  • @Jestzer
    2•1 year ago

    You’re most welcome.

    Do you remember if FileVault was enabled? My understanding is that if it was, then the HDD’s contents will be encrypted and you’ll need either the Mac account’s password or FileVault recovery key to access the files. Without FileVault enabled, I’d imagine it’d be plug-n-play.

    Make sure you follow a guide for getting the HDD out. There are comments on the guide, read them for helpful tips.

    If the HDD seems to be dead (clicking noises, disk isn’t spinning, etc.) I’d highly recommend stopping whatever you’re doing in that moment and bring the HDD to data recovery specialists. They are not cheap, but for good reason. What they do is not easy and very resource-consuming even when all fails.

    EDIT: typos.

    • sabOP
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you! I will make sure to be careful.

      I doubt FileVault is enabled, as the owner is very tech illiterate and hasn’t even updated the computer in a long time. If it is that’s very useful information though - hopefully the potential key would be connected to her Mac user and not Apple ID (as I interpreted elsewhere), as that would be seemingly impossible to retrieve.

      Also good to know there are options even in the worst case scenario, if that is applicable to SSDs as well. I’m crossing my fingers it won’t come to that though.