Chosen Solution
Please don’t suggest Option +R or Option + Command +R. I’ve tried it all and think I made my failing hard drive worse. I’ve taken my laptop to TWO different repairs shops and neither one of them have been able to get the data off of the hard drive. My option now is to wipe the drive clean and lose all my data, pictures, files, etc. I was told I could send the hard drive somewhere and pay a fee to have the data pulled off. Does anyone know who does this? It’s a 2016 or 2017 so not that old. Any suggestions are much appreciated as this came out of nowhere and I don’t have my laptop backed up on the cloud.
First there is no hard drive! The new Touch Bar MacBook Pro’s use an intergraded storage solution. Basically the flash chips are soldered directly on the logic board as you can see here (Yellow marked chips).
This is from the iFixit teardown MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar Teardown Now the good news! Apple did design in a way to recover your data from these soldered in chips! There is a special connector on the logic board for a special tool to be fitted to gain access the your flash chips.
Here’s more on the setup to recover your data This is Apple’s special tool to help customers recover data from the MacBook Pro’s non-removable SSD Some shops also have this tool, many don’t know about it though!
