DIY MacBook Data Recovery Over the LAN

DISCLAIMER: I make no claim that this will work for anyone else! We were fortunate that the system was able to boot as far as it did (loading the network and related services), and that there was a delay to the boot loop, and that the data wasn’t corrupted, and that we had an old MacBook to connect to it.

The Crash

The MacBook got into a weird bootloop: It would complain that the system needed to be reinstalled or repaired, but within 30-60 seconds it would reboot again. But sometimes it would get as far as the login screen and stay there for a while. Actually trying to log in would just trigger another reboot.

Limits of Genius (Bar)

We weren’t able to get any kind of disk repair or reinstall to run. It just rebooted after 30-60 seconds, regardless. So we took it to the Apple Store. They spent an hour trying to diagnose, revive, reinstall, etc., but nothing they tried worked either. It would only run for about a minute at a time, even when it was supposed to only be sharing diagnostics (or disk access) to another computer. We left it overnight so they could work on it further.

They concluded it was a fault in the logic board.

Great! That meant the data should be fine, and we had some files on there that were newer than the latest backup, that we really wanted if possible! They could replace the board and keep the drive, or we could find a way to hook it up to another b…wait…this is a MacBook…

The drive is soldered directly to the logic board.

That means the drive can’t just be pulled out and plugged into a working machine. And replacing the logic board means replacing the drive too.

So Katie started calling data recovery places for cost estimates, and I went to pick up the laptop.

The Crazy Idea

BUT! It was recognizing the accounts on the system, and our saved WiFi network. I had a crazy idea (but it just might work!): On our home network, would it be possible to connect from another machine over the network?

It responded to ping. We hadn’t turned on SSH on the device, but Finder on the old MacBook was able to connect to it…and log in…and view folders…and view files…and generate thumbnails…AND COPY THEM!!!

It still rebooted itself after a minute or so, but I was able to grab the most important files in that time, and the next most important during the next cycle, until after a few more rounds than I would have preferred, I got back to the point of our last backup.

I really appreciated that Finder will retry for a while after the connection drops, and it will save long copy processes (ex. that Minecraft instance with a bunch of new hours on it) to resume after reconnecting.

Tedious, but a whole lot cheaper (and faster) than professional data recovery would have been!

It’s still going to be expensive to get the board fixed, but at least we don’t need to worry about the data loss anymore.