Inherited friends’ 2010 Macbook Pro and can’t get into it. | Mac

Hi r/mac! I have a bit of a complicated question for you all.

So my roommate gave me his mom’s old Macbook Pro from 2010 and he said I could have it, if I could get into it because his mom forgot the password to it and hadn’t used it in years. I thought that it might be fun to figure out as I have built my own computer before and played around with computers. I am however no I.T. professional and I have never owned a Apple product before.

So I followed the steps of going into recovery mode and attempting a clean install / booting to a previous state / doing the terminal reset command process outlined in this CNET article.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/reset-bypass-password-mac-macbook/

I got errors for all of these and attempting to reset the password would prompt an error when trying to hit save. I followed another one that involved going into the cmd S menu on bootup. I entered the commands listed.

https://www.iseepassword.com/reset-mac-login-password.html (Method 3)

mount -uw /

rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

shutdown –h

The article said it should’ve shutdown on the final command but nothing happened and I had to reset it. Now when I turn it on it loads (very sluggishly) about half way through the load-up bar then turns off. I’m afraid I may have fried the hard drive. The laptop dies before I can get into the Utilities menu with cmd R but I can still get into the cmd S menu.

I was wondering if there were any methods that I could take to potentially salvage this hard drive. If not, would putting in a new hard drive allow me to make a fresh install with a reset password, and would replacing the battery be doable, because I have not found many batteries for it on Amazon that don’t have horrible reviews of either being bad batteries or exploding.

It looks like replacing the hard drive and battery would run me about $100. I don’t know how well Macbooks hold up over time so would this even be worth it? I’m a student so I was hoping to be able to use it for notes. If it isn’t I’d rather put the money towards some other cheap Notebook. Thank you so much for reading my post please let me know if you need anymore information.