Machine died, need to transfer data

[apinchofhope]

Was playing a video game, using machine as usual when screen went dark, wouldn’t come back to life.
Running Sierra, clover 4586. Can get to Clover screen, can select Boot macOS from HD, won’t get past the Apple logo/loading bar.

At this point I have minimal troubleshooting knowledge since I built this so long ago and haven’t really touched an update in a while. I just need to access my data and transfer to a backup drive, and move on. Literally any thoughts or ideas would be helpful. Thank you.

Edited to add: haven’t updated graphics drivers in too long because High Sierra would not play nice (aka I could never get the install to work) and so poor thing is super out of date.

 

[jaymonkey]

I have minimal troubleshooting knowledge since I built this so long ago and haven’t really touched an update in a while. I just need to access my data and transfer to a backup drive, and move on. Literally any thoughts or ideas would be helpful. Thank you.

@apinchofhope,

Since you state that your current install is quite old, I would do a clean/fresh install onto another SSD or Hard Drive (assuming the rest of the hardware is still ok) ... do the new install with the old drive unplugged.

Once the system is up and running you can then plug the old drive back in and copy your data on to the new drive just using MacOS Finder. This method would give you the opportunity to update MacOS, Clover and all the 3rd party kexts to the most recent versions.

Cheers
Jay