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Question

Recovering a couple of files on corrupted Mac

  • January 8, 2015
  • 10 replies
  • 85 views
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Morning all,

Working at a school the wonderful children never listen and backup files as suggested and as expected one of the little darlings needs his work on a Mac that won't now boot up.
Tried doing a repair disc etc, which is presenting errors and therefore the less time consuming thing is to rebuild.

I need your expertise in how to get the files off the mac onto a USB, if that's possible.
I can not seem to boot up in safe mode and can boot to single user mode and verbose. But in verbose, the mac restarts

What would you suggest please?

    10 replies

    C
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    • Chris
    • Valued Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Does Target Disk mode work?

    G
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    • g1za
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    HI Chris,

    It does, but i don't have a firewire cable.

    H
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    • hiiamelliott
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Alternatively, if you have an external hard drive with an OS on it, you could boot into that (hold Alt/Option at startup), find the files on the internal drive and copy them wherever.

    G
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    • g1za
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    I haven't got one, but something to do in the future, should this happen again though.

    C
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    • Chris
    • Valued Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Got a Netboot server/image?

    G
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    • g1za
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Yes

    davidacland
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    • davidacland
    • Valued Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    If its 10.7 or newer you may be able to boot to recovery mode (hold down alt on startup) then access the data from the command line. Target mode will be a lot easier though if the student can wait until you get a cable.

    damienbarrett
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    • damienbarrett
    • Honored Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Everyone repeat after me: "You clearly don't care about your data, so why should we?"

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    • g1za
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    Lol @damienbarrett][/url

    I've managed to source a firewire so hopefully tomorrow i'll be able to sort that.

    Q
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    • qhle373
    • Contributor
    • January 8, 2015

    If you've got a spare external around that you could even just add a partition to you could install an OS (same or newer) than that of the target Mac. Go through the setup screens once its done, and then just boot from that partition. When it doesn't have to launch as the booted drive, it has a better chance at mounting.

    Also you can trigger the mount by Verifying or trying to Repair even knowing that it will fail. A lot of times it forces the mount after that alert to give you a chance to access it.

    Hope it mounts successfully for you. If the data gives you trouble when you're trying to move it, "cp -rfv <source> <destination>" helps to skip troublesome files to continue the copy without stopping.

    Good luck

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