Mac Book Pro & Mac Air

MACBOOK PRO:

I have a pair of Macbook Pro laptops, the older of which is from 2006 at the latest, and the other from late 2008. I use them with an Apple-approved external hard drive. The age of the computers has always made it important to back up to the hard drive, but I now have a big problem with the drive, rather than with the computers. The hard drive has stopped connecting to either of the Macbooks, and when I tried to connect it to a Toshiba laptop, it installed an OS over the top of the files. I have been back onto the Macs to see if that has had any influence over how it connects to the machines, but it still won’t respond. This is a tragedy to me because I have a lot of very important work on there, including research notes which would take me weeks to replace. I want to recover the data from the hard drive as the most important goal, because I can buy a replacement hard drive.

MACBOOK AIR:

I have a new NAS server which I intended to use as the network server for my computers, including two Windows PCs and a Macbook Air. I wanted to unite my data in one convenient place, but I am having trouble accessing the Mac data on the drive when I use the Macbook. I have been able to go into the NAS, and I can see the data on the drive, all clearly labelled as from the Mac, so that I know what I am looking at. However, when I try to open one of the files, or try to save something else to the server, I am not able to do so. The computer says that I ‘don’t have permission’ to view the files or the data. As the other computers which I have connected to the NAS are not from Apple, I am not able to extract the data from those PCs, and have to do it through the Mac. I have decided that, if I can’t use the NAS for the Mac, then I need to recover the data from it.