Software opens in menu and dock but not on screen, can't use any of it.

Question

I am the administrator and my husband is a user with limited access to system preferences. On Thursday my side of the computer has gone crazy. It worked in the morning. The electric meter was replaced on my house in the afternoon which may have caused a power surge. On Friday when I turned it on I got a message that my time and date was not correct and that some software might act weird because the date was before 2001. I tried opening system preferences to correct the date. It showed open in the menu and in the dock but never opened on the screen so I had no access to it. The hated beach ball spun forever. All of the software I have tried to open does the same thing. They won't force quit. I have to manually turn off the computer and when I turn it back on they have been shut down.
If I log in as my husband, the software all works but I don't have access to my documents. I can't change the clock because he isn't authorized to change most of the preferences. The clock apparently isn't the reason that my software is misbehaving because it is working on his side.
If you can recommend any fixes I will try them if I understand them. I did run disc utility from his side and it said everything is fine. Looking forward to some help so that I can avoid turning it over to a repair shop.
Sincerely,
Gail L.

Answer 1

You can probably install it into a working computer as a second drive. Typically that just involves opening the computer, and plugging in a power supply and data connection. Unless you already have two drives in the computer, there should be unused connectors available. You'll recognize them because they should be chained with the connections to the drive that's already there. If you touch anything inside the computer be sure to ground yourself first to avoid the rare possibility of a static discharge which could damage sensitive electronics.
You can also buy a converter to use an internal drive as an external drive. Might be too pricy just to attempt some data recovery, but if the hardware itself is still good you might consider ultimately reformatting the old corrupted drive and using it as extra storage space.
Either of those options would probably preclude the necessity of a target mode boot, since the drive ought to show up and your data be available. Target mode would be a way to access the old computer as if it were an external drive.
Interestingly, the Mac Geniuses claimed they had the same problem as you, that the old computer would freeze when they tried to copy data. I don't know what they were doing, but I had no problems when I used the firewire target mode. In my case, the drive was OK, but the mother board was supposedly bad. Your situation might be different, so what worked great for me may not help in your case.