IMAC HDD - Freenas Mounting ? DDRESCUE ?

[Martin Bauer]

Hello All,

Recently I got a call and was asked to recover data from an IMAC 24" that had a 500 GB HDD in it -

The machine wouldn't boot and the data needed to be retrieved - superITman to the rescue ! oh boy !

1. The HDD shows up in the bios just fine.
2. I haven't written to it at all ( though the owner did bring it to a MAC store first - yikes ! )

There is very little info out there regarding this type of operation for MAC HDD's that I can find -

Since I was also in the middle of a RAIDz Recovery, I thought I would try using the DDRESCUE program and found ubuntu-rescue-remix - not wowing me ! -

I tried to run some of the commands from this thread and it ran so quickly I'm sure it did nothing, but I'm going to boot the Freenas server again and look to see if there's anything there ( on the JBOD ) -

Can anyone help me with this ?

 

[anodos]

Depending on what is wrong with the disk, you might be able to just use the Mac's recovery tools. It's been a long time since I worked with Macs. You used to be able to boot from the OSX install media and mount the disk / do recovery stuff.

If it's not something simple like they screwed up something OS-related, you should probably use DD the drive before trying to recover, and perform recovery on the DD image rather than the original drive.

 

[travalon]

Does the disk spin? You may just want to run a live CD of Linux (I like Mint) and see if you can see the files. Or this might get you started:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/using-ddrescue-on-failing-drive-4175489935/