Copy MacBook Pro files to PC--pulled HDD

wayout2day

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 15, 2006
Messages
170
Customer requested that I copy files from MacBook Pro that won't boot.

I only work with Windows. I don't have a working Apple computer.

Can i pull the HDD and connect to USB of a PC (like i do with Windows pc's) ?

Do i need special software to "convert" the files ?
 
http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/ i downloaded this to try HFSExplorer, it loaded quickly. I'm not sure the Client has another Apple machine. Mostly pictures is the reason for the request. I will try and give her a copy in each format if i can, or just in the apple format as you suggest... thank you VM
 
The safest thing is to use linux and mount the HFS drive read only on it and then copy the files. You do _not_ want to convert or do _any_ kind of writes on the drive using windows. At no circumstance, unless you want to destroy the customers data.
 
Quick note, modern macOS can read and write to exFAT partitions, so you could do that.
A MacOS that won't boot can't read or write anything. What the OP could do however is boot the mac from an external hard drive, but he would need to install MacOS on it naturally. Unless the Mac is ancient, every Mac has an online boot option that enables online boot and reinstall.
 
I removed the HDD from the Mac. Using USB, I connected to my PC. I opened HFSExplorer. HFSE found nothing. I then conducted a HDD test using WD Lifeguard. Quick test found enough errors to terminate the scan. Thanks everyone. i learned something. Next time i will at least have a few tools to use.
 
I removed the HDD from the Mac. Using USB, I connected to my PC. I opened HFSExplorer. HFSE found nothing. I then conducted a HDD test using WD Lifeguard. Quick test found enough errors to terminate the scan. Thanks everyone. i learned something. Next time i will at least have a few tools to use.
And she of course didn't have a backup of anything, right? Even though Apple makes it super easy by connecting a time machine drive. Even though they don't manufacture time capsules anymore, many routers enable you to use an USB hdd as one.

I wouldn't trust any Windows based tool checking the drive though. If they expect to find a non-encrypted file system or a windows filesystem, they may give false errors.
 
HFSExplorer will work only with HFS/HFS+ volumes in my understanding.

If the Mac was running a recent version of macOS, it likely used APFS. On Linux/Ubuntu, you can install libfsapfs-utils or apfs-fuse and access APFS volumes.

If the drive has hardware faults, do not attempt any kind of recovery on that disk. Instead, create a disk image (using dd_rescure or similar) to a known good drive and perform your recovery there.
 
HFSExplorer will work only with HFS/HFS+ volumes in my understanding.

If the Mac was running a recent version of macOS, it likely used APFS. On Linux/Ubuntu, you can install libfsapfs-utils or apfs-fuse and access APFS volumes.

If the drive has hardware faults, do not attempt any kind of recovery on that disk. Instead, create a disk image (using dd_rescure or similar) to a known good drive and perform your recovery there.
Good point. If it's an updated mac OS it will use apfs so the hfs tool will not see data even though it's there. Yet another reason why one should never write anything to a drive to be recovered. Even if the drive is damaged, it can safely be read. But once you write on it (such as trying to convert it to some windows file format), most likely data will be permanently overwritten and then it's game over.
 
If the Mac won’t boot at all, even from external sources, put the drive in another Mac or Linux box. You know how to copy files from one Mac disk to another. If you can access the drive using a Linux box, mount the drive as read-only and use dd to copy the disk from one to another (there are tutorials for how to do this so I’m keeping this basic).

If you can download and burn Kali Linux to CD and boot the Mac that way, you can insert a second hard drive into the Mac and do the same mount read-only and copy using dd from one drive to the other. Make sure the destination drive is no smaller than your source drive or you will lose data.

I had a corporate drive that went bad with projects that were never backed up. We ended up recovering about 95% of the corrupted drive by booting the Mac with Kali Linux. (Even though the Mac’s boot drive wasn’t bad it made things a lot easier to let Kali Linux be in control for the recovery as Mac-based free recovery tools are garbage and the non-free ones tend to cost a lot and you won’t know how successful those tools will be until after you buy them…)
 
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