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estockme

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 3, 2011
249
4
So my roommate's imac has officially taken a crap and I'm trying to fix it for him. He has a nice OWS external hard drive that he purchased to use as a time machine, but it appears he hasn't turned it on since 2010... my stuff is safe and backed up, in fact i had been wanting to do a reinstall, but I need to copy the corrupted hard drive to his external before I do the reinstall.

So here:

I need a bootable Usb (preferably) or cd that will bring up some disk utilities that will let me do that. from there i am guessing i can recover the files using some linux utility i used in the past. I'm downloading systemrescuecd right now and having trouble getting it onto a bootable usb, but does anyone have any more in-depth tips?

Essentially on the main Mac HD volume all choices to repair or verify are greyed out. I can't drag it into the box to back up/copy as an image to another disk (empty time machine space nor a new partition i split off the time machine). From searches the input/output error seems to be a signal that the hard disk is failing.
 
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