How do i access my installer disc on a 2011 macbook pro as they are virtual now, i have tried to use command r and hold shift on start up

Question

I have, a 2011 macbook pro with osx lion, last year  it died, by doing the not getting past the logo and startup gear, i tried doing the data screen repair where u type some code and try and repair, that didnt work so i took it to genius bar and it wasnt in warrenty and they were gonna charge me but as was only 3 weeks over the warrenty period, so they did for free, and the harddrive they installed had a 90 day warrenty and that is ova now, and my mac has now done the same thing again and this time i think was a power interruption at some point and now has a fault, another thing that crossed my mind is that yes this has done this but could they have (to save money and not right offf a new one) given me my same harddrive back and jus wiped it now 5 months down the track its broken again?
The laptop isnt even 18 months old and has broken down twice, my old macbook had 4 5 years not a hiccup.
In conclusion i need to get photoes off it and cant seem to activate safe mode, or do i know how to access the startup disk that the guy did at genius last time, or get to the data screeen that allowed me to attempt to repair the drive. Can someone help me please, i have tried command r and holding shift, meither have worked.

Answer 1

It's hard to know whether your hard drive has actually failed or if your system has just gotten badly corrupt. If the former, unfortunately, there may be no way to get any data off the drive at this point. If there aren't any backups of that data, it will be gone forever, unless perhaps a high-priced (ie, in the thousand dollar range) data recovery service has some luck with it.
If the system and/or hard drive are badly corrupt, the same may be true. Some or all of that data may be irrevocably corrupt by now. However, there are some ways that you can attempt to recover from this situation without paying such huge fees. First, if you have access to another Mac, and both have Firewire ports, you can connect the two using Firewire target disk mode. This will mount the damaged drive as if it were an external hard drive on the second Mac, and could allow you to copy some data from the drive.
Another possibility would be to buy an external hard drive, install Mac OS X on it and boot the machine from that, then copy any data from there that you can.
In both of these cases, it may be helpful to scan the damaged drive for recoverable files using something like Data Rescue.
There are also some possible ways to repair the drive if you can't do either of those things, but any repairs at this point could potentially destroy data. I only recommend this as a last resort. Still, if all other options have failed, try repairing the drive using DiskWarrior. This can fix problems that Disk Utility (and fsck, the command-line tool that it sounds like you may have used) cannot. It is possible that DiskWarrior will be able to get the drive back in working order long enough to get the data recovered, though of course it's also possible the process will be destructive.
If none of the above work, you'll have to seek professional help.