Tricky Data Recovery Process
Saturday, December 26, 2009 at 5:04PM This Christmas we went to visit my inlaws out in Chicago. As we were approaching our destination, my wife received a text on her iPhone, "Ask Chris what we should do with the Mac Mini. When we try to boot it up, it gets stuck at the Apple logo."
Long story short, this Mac's drive was shot. The drive not only wouldn't boot properly, it wouldn't even mount in target disk mode. I could boot the Mac in singler user mode (restart holding down command+S) which enabled me to see the files via command line so I knew that they were still there. I just couldn't get to them. To make matters worse, my brother in law then informed me that he had very important files on the computer related to an audit that he was involved in at work. No backups. Not good.
Here's what I eventually had to do to recover the files. I connected a FireWire drive to the Mac Mini and booted it up off of a retail Mac OS X 10.5 DVD. Once I could see the Utilities menu, I opened up terminal and ran:
cd /Volumes
and then:
ls
This returned:
Macintosh HD FireWire HD
Now that I was sure that the two drives could be seen via command line, I did:
cd Macintosh\ HD/Users/
then:
cp -R brotherinlaw/Documents/ /Volumes/FireWire\ HD/
Once the cp command completed, I did:
ls /Volumes/FireWire\ HD/
This resulted in seeing that all of the files that my brother in law needed were now on the FireWire drive! I'm still in the process of backing up data. I'll update this post as soon as I know one way or another if I was completely successful.
One very strange behavior ocurred in that the failing drive (Macintosh HD) wouldn't show up in the Mac OS X Installer until I opened up Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and clicked on its root partition. After I did that, I quit out of Disk Utility and eventually it showed up in the installer. I could then see the drive when I did a:
ls /Volumes
These commands explained for those of you new to Unix:
cd = Change Directory
ls = List Files
cp -R = Copy Recursively
CH
UPDATE: It worked.
Reader Comments (3)
Any reason why you didn't boot the mini into firewire target mode and copy the files form there?
Hi Ryan,
As I mentioned in the article, "...it wouldn't even mount in target disk mode."
I wish it could have been that easy.
Chris
That's what I get for reading too fast. :-) It's weird though that it was able to mount the drive in single user mode but not in firewire target mode. Even more strange that booted into an installation DVD it mounted the drive.
One other option if you had a same CPU mac with you is to start your Mac in target mode, then boot the sick mini with the option key and select your good mac as the drive to boot.