Pulling Data Off a Dead Computer

My wife's new MacBook Air will arrive tomorrow and so I started the process of pulling data, files, and pictures off her old one. So how do you do that when the computer won't even boot? Today I worked to figure that out and had great success with the help of my oldest son.

The key to the process is that my son has a MacBook Air that is the same era as my wife's old one. He doesn't use it any more and loaned it to us. Having recently replaced the battery in the laptop, I have all the tools necessary to unscrew the screws for the case and access the internals. So after skiing this morning, I put both laptops on the kitchen table and removed the bottom panel for each computer. Then I gently removed the solid-state drive from my wife's and swapped it with my sons. The hard drives on MacBook Air laptops look more like a couple of chips on a printed circuit board (PCB) and could easily be mistaken for memory chips, which is exactly what they are, just a different kind of memory.

I screwed the back onto my son's laptop, flipped it over, and pressed the power button. The computer booted right up and I logged in. I made sure I could access all her files and then closed the lid, putting the computer into sleep mode. Then I put my son's solid-state drive into my wife's old computer, screwed the back panel back on, and tried to turn it on. Nothing happened which is what I expected. I really did this just to make sure I didn't lose any screws or parts.

My hope is that the new computer will work similarly to when I replaced my iPhone. All I had to do was put my old phone next to my new one and the initialization process for the new one automatically copied over everything from the old one. If it doesn't work that smoothly then I have a USB drive I can copy all of the important files to and then copy them to the new computer.

Not everyone has easy access to a second laptop and you may wonder what I might have done without it. There are devices you can get that are meant to access solid-state drives and my son also has one of those. Then of course, there is the option of going to the local thrift store like my 8-year-old neighbor and finding a cheap laptop similar to my wife's. Fortunately my first solution worked.