Recovery Disk Questions

[Sirecks]

Hello all. Here's the set up. About 6 months ago my MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid 2012) started suffering from a slow or non existent boot up issue. I ended up using Disk Utility to copy the contents of the MacBook HD to an external HD. I then wiped the MacBook HD and reloaded the OS. Then, I was able to see all my files on the external HD, just as if I had opened "Macintosh HD" on the MacBook itself, and move them back onto the newly formatted and OS loaded MacBook HD. It was a pretty simple process, and very successful.

Two days ago, I started having the same issues again. I'm learning that High Sierra and my old MacBook don't like each other.

So this time, I tried to repeat the process, but I got a different result on the external HD.

Using Disk Utility, I ran what I thought was the same process as last time to copy the MacBook HD onto the the external HD. However, this time, I ended up with my external HD only having three folders on it in total. They are named "com.apple.Boot.S," "com.apple.recovery.boot," and "System." They themselves have nothing in them but folders and files that are strange to me, and in no way resemble the perfect mirror image of my MacBook HD I had last time.

Now, I had not deleted the old set of files yet off the external HD from the last transfer. There was only about 300 Gigs on the 1 Tb external HD. I only had about 300 Gigs to transfer this time as well. I should have only had about 600 Gigs at the most (if the recovery process didn't reformat the external HD) used in total after this second copy. So I left the old set alone, willing to loose it in format for the new set of files. So now, when I get the "Info" for the external HD after I completed this process, it says the drive has about 75 Mbs available!! Being that almost a whole Tb was used, I'm sure the files and information is in there somewhere, I just have no idea how to get the files and information out from these three folders. I'm afraid I'm going to screw this up further and loose them.

I did have a Time Machine back up on a separate external HD that I was able to use to recover my MacBook Pro back to working order. So I have a working laptop again. I'm just trying to basically recover any documents and pictures that were loaded up since the last back up a couple of weeks ago.

Can anyone offer some guidance and help on what I might be able to do to get the information out of these three folders? Is there a way to run a program on the MacBook and extract the information? Thanks.

Adam

 

[chscag]

You might try using recovery software such as Data Rescue or Disk Drill. However, you really need to consider changing out that hard drive which is likely failing. It can easily be replaced with a SSD which will breath new life into your 2012 MacBook Pro.

 

[chabig]

I'm learning that High Sierra and my old MacBook don't like each other.

Nonsense. High Sierra is certified to run on your machine. I agree with the chscag that this is most likely a hardware problem....failing hard drive. Follow his advice.

 

[Sirecks]

Thank you both for your responses. You confirmed what I’ve figured has been going on all along. My MacBook Pro does have a dying hard drive.

However, my question lies in the information that I can’t seem to access on my brand new external hard drive. I want to find out why I can’t seem to locate the files that I copied onto the external hard drive. Like I said, last time using the recorder option in disk utility, I was able to make an exact copy of my MacBook Pro hard drive, onto the external hard drive. This time, using the same process (I think) I ended up with an external hard drive that is almost out of room, and has nothing that resembles the files from my MacBook hard drive.