How can I back-up my hard drive when my MacBook won't power on?

The other day my 2 year old MacBook Pro just turned off abruptly and has not powered on since. I took it to the Apple store today and they determined that it's more than likely a problem with the logic board since its not getting power at all and now I'm going to have to get that replaced. Before I send it away I need to backup my hard drive to an external but have no idea how to do that when it won't even power on. We don't have any other working computers in the house but if I absolutely need another computer to accomplish this, I could try to ask a friend to help me out.

dzwick1 wrote:
I lost power to my PC. Neither the battery nor the AC adapter works. I'm shipping the laptop back to the manufacturer for repair, but they advised that I should back up my hard drive before shipping it. Is there a way to back up my hard drive without having any power on my laptop?
Do you have another machine?
You can remove the hard drive and put it in an external enclosure in order to copy the contents to another machine.
If you don't have another machine, you unfortunately are going to have to find someone to back it up for you.
*disclaimer* I am not now, nor have I ever been, an employee of Best Buy, Geek Squad, nor of any of their affiliate, parent, or subsidiary companies.

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How can I initialize an external hard drive when disk utility won't work?

Have a Seagate 300 GB external firewire drive. Formatted it for Mac. Had worked great and then one day it would not mount, got message box with choices of "initialize", "ignore" and 'eject". Clicking initialize, disk utility comes up with only the "first aid" button showing active. When I click on it nothing happens. As far as I can tgell there are no other options
Any suggestions on how I can repair this drive or recover data would be much appreciated.
Thanks, Jim

OK, I suspect First Aid may be blank since Disk Utility "sees" the device but does not think there's anything on it.
1. How about if you select the drive and then click the Erase tab?
2. Also, what happens if you connect the drive, select Ignore, then open Disk Utility? Does the drive show up?
3. What's your objective here? Do you want to try to recover data from the drive, or simply erase it? If you're looking to recover data from the drive, see my "Data Recovery" FAQ.
4. Do you know what happened before the problem arose? For example, was there a power outage or was the cable or drive suddenly disconnected before the drive was Ejected? Any of these events can result in the drive's partition map being corrupted, leading to the kind of problems you're seeing.
5. Did you build this FireWire drive? That is, buy and enclosure, buy a drive, and install the latter in the former? If so, have you checked the connections?
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

How can I back up a hard drive with another hard drive?

I don't even know what community to post this question.
I have a standard usb 3.0, 4TB hard drive that I store EVERYTHING on (pictures, music, movies, documents). I spent this past summer organizing all of my files from multiple old hard drives and compiling them onto this one. It's very nice and organized now however, after all of this work I don't want to lose my stuff if the hd fails or something happens. So I bought another exact hd to back it up.
Before I do so, I was contemplating if there is any software or a better way than me doing this manually. I can easily copy the contents over and it will be backed up, but what happens if I make a change to my main hard drive i.e. add something or delete something. I would have to keep record of every change I make and do that exact same thing on the backup hard drive.
I'm guessing there's probably a simpler option that I'm just not aware of so that's why I'm coming here. Is there any way to select a hard drive and designate it as a backup for another hard drive so it will do all of that process automatically? I know my iMac has time machine, but I don't really know how that works and that seems to want to backup my desktop computer, which I'm not really interested in doing since I don't really store much on it other than my main programs. I also don't know where it backs things up to. Does it just double up on your current hard drive or have cloud storage or what?
Thanks for any advice.

Time Machine will back up the internal drive by default and can be set to back up external ones formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It can put the data onto a drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or a network storage location, but not Apple's iCloud servers.
(114109)

How can I back up external hard drives to time capsule?

I own an iMac and have two external drives hooked up to it. I also have a time capsule. Is it possible to back up the external drives automatically or manually to the Time Capsule?
-knarfy

I don't think Time Machine would work, but SuperDuper! (to a disk image on the Time Capsule) or Retrospect, or another backup program could do it.

How can I replace my internal hard drive on my Macbook?

I have a 13 inch aluminum late 2008 MacBook. The processor is 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 running OS X Lion 10.7.4. The hard drive is currently set up as follows:
Macintosh HD 132.5 GB (with only 1.32 GB free)
BOOTCAMP 26.69 GB (with 6.15 GB free)
I am unsure if this matters but here is the info just in case:
On my Macintosh HD I have:
Audio 3.04 GB
Movies 33.11 GB
Photos 36.98 GB
Apps 15.27 GB
Backups Zero GB
Other 42.78 GB
I only use 1 software program on my Bootcamp (which I hardly use but must keep to run an electric vinyl cutting machine). I have thought of re-partitioning the drive. But then I got thinking that maybe the drive is just too small and it's no use.
I also have an older Lacie 300 GB external hard drive that I use to keep all of my iTunes Library, most of my iPhoto library and most of my data. I have another older Lacie 300 GB external hard drive that I use exclusively for my Time Machine back ups.
I also have a Western Digital 2 TB external hard drive that I use to put all of my movies on so that I can play them on any of my computers or plug into my Play Station 3 and play them on any of my TV's.
I have considered just getting another Western Digital 2 TB external hard drive to use for virtually all of the files/pictures/movies/music etc. on this internal hard drive.
Right now I am unsure what the best move is to make. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Apple Tech Support today trying to buy an internal hard drive to install myself. They were not very helpful (in fact he told me I would have to ship in my machine just to replace the battery which is NOT true). Is there anyone out there who can give me some advice on this situation? Any help or suggestion would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance.

For a new hard drive try Newegg.com http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=380&name=Laptop-Hard-Dr ives&Order=PRICE
Or OWC http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
Here are video instructions on replacing the hard drive on the Aluminum Unibody http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/macbook_13_unibody/
To transfer your current hard drive I like the free application Carbon Copy Cloner. It makes a bootable copy of everything on your hard drive http://www.bombich.com/index.html You'll need a cheap SATA external hard drive case. Put the new drive in the case then format and partition the new drive and clone your old drive to the new one. Check that it's set up right by booting up from the external drive. Then replace your old hard drive with the new one and put your old one in the external case.
Here's a cheap SATA external hard drive case on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Aluminum-External-Enclosure-Capacity/dp/B000XPS3U6/r ef=pd_cp_pc_3
If you don’t have the tools to open up the MacBook OWC has a set for $5
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMHD/

How can I download a external hard drive to my MacBook pro ?

they have to replace my Macbook Disc , and before the exchange of the disk I back up my pictures, videos, music,etc.. to a external hard dirve disk. now I have my macbook with me with the new disk , please somebody tell me how to pass the external hard drive disk to my macbook..thanks

Just open the disk image in Finder, and drag all of your files to the folder you want them to go to.

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I tried adding it to the privacy list then deleting it from that list ad nothing. I tried using terminal but I am a pc guy and couldnt get it to index the drive. Please help me, I need to be able to quickly search the drive for work.
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Hi Allen,
Is there any way to store the back up to Mac and restore after formating?

How can I use my external hard drive for my iphoto instead of my mac book pro memory?

i don't know if this question has been asked before: how can I use my external hard drive for my iphoto instead of my mac book pro memory? just like itunes all my song are save on my external hard drive. make sense?

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And be sure that the External drive is formatted Mac OS extended (journaled) (iPhoto does not work with drives with other formats) and that it is always available prior to launching iPhoto
And backup soon and often - having your iPhoto library on an external drive is not a backup and if you are using Time Machine you need to check and be sure that TM is backing up your external drive
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How can i format my external hard drive to write files from Mac without loosing the files that i alredy have on my external hard when i used it with windows?

How can i format my external hard drive to write files from Mac without loosing the files that i alredy have on my external hard when i used it with windows?
I have been using Windows to write files to my 1TB WD external hard drive and I do not want to format to loose the files capacity of around 500GB
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Hi Allen,
Is there any way to store the back up to Mac and restore after formating?

How can my daughter use the hard drive in the Time Capsule ...

So, I am in Oklahoma and my daughter is in Tennessee...
She has a Time Capsule where the Wi-fi base station quit working, but the hard drive may be OK.
She bought an Airport Express to use as a wi-fi router.
The question, then, is:
How can my daughter use the hard drive in the Time Capsule to do Time Machine backups?
Thank you very much for your insights.
Roberto

It can be done but is very messy. That is assuming the TC is still functional which I kind of doubt.. the wifi is seldom the only thing that will die .. so whatever problems it has the wifi would be the least of it.
Anyway.. do a factory reset to get started.
The Factory Reset Gen1-4.
Unplug your TC. Hold in reset. and power the TC back on.. without releasing reset for about 10sec. When the status light flashes rapidly; release it.
Be Gentle! Feel the switch click on. It has a positive feel.. add no more pressure after that.
TC will reboot after a couple of minutes with default factory settings and will wipe out previous configurations.
No files are deleted on the hard disk.. No reset of the TC deletes files.. to do that you use erase from the airport utility.
If the LED is not lit then the TC is dead, not just the wireless.
The setup for using the TC is explained in the bottom of this thread.
TC in a second local network.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4817218?tstart=30
The idea is to set the TC to provide router function.. and the computer plugged in by ethernet to as a second network.. but there are rules on how this is done which I have explained in that thread.
I notice that Mountain Lion deals better with order of network priority than Snow Leopard used to .. so it might not need to have manually set gateway and dns.. although I would still recommend it. It simply stops the second network causing issues.
It is much easier to simply purchase an external drive and plug that in.
It is cheaper, faster and more reliable than using the TC for TM anyway.
Plus a lot of the later machines no longer have ethernet ports.. and using dongles is far from neat.. although thunderbolt to ethernet is IMHO necessary accessory for anyone without ethernet.

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OK. Start with:
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
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How can I back-up my hard drive when my MacBook won't power on?

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