Backing up my broken macbook?

Ok I have a February 2011 (pretty sure that's right) that I bought refurbished under about 8 months ago. It has had some problems and I brought it in to the apple store and they said they'd send it in to have the graphics card replaced, but I half wonder if there's a lot more going on. I used to be able to log on, it would just freeze with dead pixels all over, but now I can't even log in. I get the spinning beach ball whenever I enter my login. I am totally fine just sending it into apple, but none of my stuff is backed up. Any time I would try to launch time machine, my computer would crash. Now since I can't log in I can't even get that far...
Does anyone know of a way to back up to an external hard drive when the computer won't fully turn on? Also, some of the commands like "d" and "command s" at startup won't work.

There are several ways to back up a Mac that is unable to fully boot. You need an external hard drive to hold the backup data.
1. Boot into Recovery (command-R at startup; 10.7 or later), from a local Time Machine backup volume (option key at startup; 10.7.2 or later), or from your installation disc (C key at startup; 10.6.8 or earlier.) Launch Disk Utility and follow the instructions in the support article linked below, under “Instructions for backing up to an external hard disk via Disk Utility.”
How to back up and restore your files
2. If you have access to a working Mac, and both it and the non-working Mac have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports, boot the non-working Mac in target disk mode by holding down the key combination command-T at the startup chime. Connect the two Macs with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable. The internal drive of the machine running in target mode will mount as an external drive on the other machine. Copy the data to another drive. This technique won't work with USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth.
How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode
3. If the internal drive of the non-working Mac is user-replaceable, remove it and mount it in an external enclosure or drive dock. Use another Mac to copy the data.

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