Macbook Air M.2 recovery

[IVIYTH0S]

Hey everyone, so my friend spilled milk on her macbook air and killed her logic/motherboard. It'd cost $755 to replace from Apple (LOL!) or $289 for the part (still LOL!) and whatever humble sum more from me to replace it.

 

Considering the overpricing of Apple stuff I recommended she just sell off the parts and then buy a more modular windows laptop with the money she'd make from the sale + the money she would have invested in the part and my labor.

 

Now the catch is, she needs (or would REALLY like) to get her data off the little M.2 stick SSD that's in there. The problem is I know Apple is apple and I have a feeling that the $17.50 M.2 to USB 3.0 enclosure on ebay won't have some proprietary identification handshake with the stick and therefore wouldn't work. Have any of you OCC mac users ever done this experiment before with any old M.2-->USB 3.0 enclosure before and had success?

 

I wasn't able to find anyone else who needed to get their data off in this manner as all of them weren't dead dead and could just get into some kind of recovery mode for data recovery.

 

So it gives us five options now:

1)Her roommate has a macbook air, of hopefully the same or similar enough generation, that I could throw it in and then get her stuff off.

 

2)Roll the dice, drop $17.50 and try the enclosure.

 

3)Get on a mac forum and hopefully find someone with the same generation (assuming the roommate's was an incompatible generation) and nearby to use to recover the data.

 

4)See how much it'd be for the Evil Fruit company to get her data off

 

5)Just consider the data a loss and start shopping

[greengiant912]

I am assuming since there has been liquid damage to the logic board, that it does not power on. If by chance it does you can utilize target disk mode to get the data off. It essentially makes the entire computer one big external hard drive.

 

 

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19021?locale=en_US

Edited April 4, 2015 by greengiant912

[IVIYTH0S]

It's sold now, good riddance haha

 

Thanks for the tip though, I had heard of that but yeah it wouldn't turn on at all. Luckily her roommate had the same or a very similar generation MBA that I was able to put her SSD into and get her stuff off of. (was a hell of a headache working with OS though)

[greengiant912]

It's sold now, good riddance haha

 

Thanks for the tip though, I had heard of that but yeah it wouldn't turn on at all. Luckily her roommate had the same or a very similar generation MBA that I was able to put her SSD into and get her stuff off of. (was a hell of a headache working with OS though)

 

OS X is Unix based, so you can utilize the terminal to move your way around the directories. A simple "cp -r /Users/*username* /Volumes/*ExHDD*" would copy the entire user directory to an external hard drive. On a Mac generally any user documents and settings are stored in the Users directory (ex: /Users/greengiant/) 

 

Love it or hate it OS X is designed brilliantly, you only have a few major moving parts. The System (which is the OS), the library (items that support the system, and applications), Users directories (all user account data), and Applications (any installed applications). Makes things super nice for troubleshooting issues. Lets say there is an OS issue that won't let my computer boot correctly. Don't need to reinstall the whole OS and loose all my data, all I really need to do is maybe replace the System, which is the OS while preserving my user data. 

Edited April 4, 2015 by greengiant912

[IVIYTH0S]

The fact that I couldn't MOVE what I wanted to and the fact that all the photos/videos are put into a large image database file (iphoto library) and you have to "export" them back to normal files is not genius, it is mental retardation of the highest degree. I could find a certain photo or video with finder but then when I actually went to open it...I effing photo would be there to open in, nowhere to be found as a file in finder. Couldn't they just have had iPhoto reference the photos or videos main directories?

 

I can't blame them for the HFS+ and NTFS incompatibility (hell windows doesn't even natively read HFS+) but thankfully I discovered Paragon which let me write to my drives which were formatted NTFS. (FAT32 has the stupid 4GB 32bit restriction so I refuse to keep any external HDDs or flash drives formatted this way)

 

You make some good points, though, it is a good idea to have the OS structured like that (like many UNIX/Linux OS's I'd imagine) but I just can't get over how restricted I felt using it. I'm sure it can be customized to let you have more control over things but jesus, just let me move files where I want! lol (It was running Mavericks) I felt like I was a toddler and the OS was like "no no no, you can't do that, you don't know any better"

Edited April 4, 2015 by IVIYTH0S