<p>Something else on Apple Stores: the level of technical and repair expertise varies from store to store. My local store did a repair for us in-house. Two other stores (our local store is fairly new) had to send it out to do the repairs. Sending it out took a week. Doing it in-house took two days.</p>
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<p>When did she buy this machine?</p>
<p>Motherboard failure, outside of spills or drops and the nVidia problem are fairly unusual. Macs have this neat capability of remote boot where you can boot from the hard disk of one Mac to another machine via a FireWire cable. It’s like using the MacBook as a remote disk. This is one way to get files off of an otherwise dead MacBook Pro - you just need another Mac with a Firewire cable.</p>
<p>I don’t think that it would hurt to contact her professors at this point - there’s not much to lose.</p>
<p>^ Ask your D if they did the firewire thing at the apple store? that should have been the first thing they tried if the hard disk was having issues.</p>
<p>If it was really a motherboard failure then it should be quite easy to get the files off the hard disk by plugging it into another similar computer model as the main drive for it and booting up, by plugging it into a device that attaches to another computer externally (like a USB port), or by plugging it in as a second drive if the computer permits it. It sounds as if the Apple store people either weren’t very knowledgable or just didn’t want to spend the time to help your D. </p>
<p>But it sounds as if it’s already been shipped back for repair. I hope your D was able to borrow the notes from another classmate to help her with her studies.</p>
<p>My computer lost its ability to get to Windows last week. It simply didn’t open up (not a Mac). My husband used a program called Knopix to retrieve everything from my hard drive. It worked very well (this was given to DH by the H of a CC friend!!). Worked like a charm…and good thing he took all my documents, pictures, and favorites off the drive because ALL was lost in the rebuild of Windows.</p>
<p>I can’t believe there isn’t a similar product out there for Macs.</p>
<p>Just want to second alwaysamom’s suggestion that your D contact her friends via Facebook, if she uses that. She could do one post to all her Facebook friends asking for help with this situation, instead of having to contact them all individually.</p>
<p>As ever the skeptical one, I do not believe the original post anymore. It just strikes me as strange that the student has basically thrown up her hands saying she can’t do anything to recover her laptop, nor get any notes, a manual, email addresses, find friends, and well, might as well fail; and that her parent can’t think of alternatives either. </p>
<p>Maybe this was a student posting, looking to see if an excuse would fly and clearly the responses so far suggest it would not in real life. I wonder where the OP went.</p>
<p>Knoppix is a Linux Distribution. You can make a bootable Linux CD/DVD which can open up the disk drive even if Windows is damaged. Macs use EFI and I’m unsure as to whether Linux bootable distros support it. In your case, the failure was probably a bad disk block on a critical Windows file. The OP’s problem sounds hardware related though they didn’t specify an exact set of circumstances.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the excellent advice. Sorry for the delay replying. The store was able to extract her files and get them on an external hard drive, so that was good news. Turns out that the lab manual had been posted to Blackboard, so that helped too. Fortunately her college has a library that’s open 24 hours during finals week, so she could get everything that was posted by the professors there. She also did find a classmate who shared notes, and I told her to do what we used to do, study the textbooks. It all worked out well and her lowest grade was a B, so now she knows that studying all along is necessary in college. </p>
<p>Thanks for the advice on TimeMachine and SugarSync. For my own backup I’ve relied on flash drives and emailing important documents to myself, but she really should use TimeMachine and if SugarSync backs up automatically, it will be well worth it. Some day I am going to have to learn more about computers.</p>
<p>I’m glad it worked out for her. Congrats on her great grades!</p>
<p>I want to add another plug for Dropbox which one of my kids uses. He says it backs up his files automatically. The first 2 GB of online storage are free which is plenty for him.
<a href=“http://www.dropbox.com/features[/url]”>http://www.dropbox.com/features</a></p>
<p>Another vote for Dropbox – and they even have an app for the iPhone so you can access your documents when you don’t have a computer handy.</p>
<p>And with regards to MAC’s, what is different is THE SOFTWARE. The hardware is not apple per se. My D’s Macbook crashed when it was 8 mos old. Something stopped spinning, it would have cost thousands to try to retrieve data, and we were told unless there was a PhD thesis on it, it was not worth the cost to try to retrieve. AND the hard drive was a TOSHIBA. The apple store said the hardware is hardware and drives in Macbooks are built by other companies. It was under warranty and replaced. Now, Time Machine and an external hard drive with back up daily during important times. She also uses google docs and emails stuff to herself all the time.</p>
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<p>This perfectly happy ending is about as believable as the original post.</p>
<p>swimrunmom:</p>
<p>I can hear the panic gone in your voice. It sounds as if it all worked out for your D but just required some ‘adjustment’ for the situation. Thanks for letting us know how it worked out - it’ll probably help some others who end up in the same situation.</p>
<p>Thanks for the update…and glad it all worked out.</p>