Hi everyone, I'm in a bit of a pickle. I tried to upgrade to 10.7 and somehow corrupted my HD so it wont boot, cant be repaired, wont mount and wont backup. At the same time, in Disk Utility, I can go in and view the entire contents of the HD so I know the whole thing is not corrupt. I need to copy my user file to an external HD so I can wipe my drive and reinstall OS X. Is there any software I can boot into that will allow me to copy specific files to an external HD? The only other route I can think of would be to remove the HD, install a new one, install OS X, buy a SATA-USB converter, plug in the old HD and copy over the files. Unfortunately I cant afford to buy a new HD at the moment. So there I am. Any useful responses will be met with joy! Thanks again. Mike PS I know this question may have been answered previously but I am in a time bind (aka work in 15 minutes) and I need to get this fixed ASAP. I apologize!
Have you tried this: Recovery HD OS X Lion includes a built in set of utilities in the Recovery HD. Restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R), and keep holding them until the Apple icon appears, indicating that your Mac is starting up. After the Recovery HD is finished starting up, you should see a desktop with a Mac OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" application window. Note: If you see a login window or your own desktop and icons, it is possible that you didn't hold Command-R early enough. Restart and try again. In order to reinstall OS X Lion, you will need to be connected to an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network. The Wi-Fi menu item is in the upper-right corner of the screen. Click the icon to display all available Wi-Fi networks. Click your preferred network name and, if needed, enter a username and/or password.
Maybe the Lion install got far enough along that the recovery partition was created. Maybe Command + R would work.
http://www.maciverse.com/installing-snow-leopard-onto-an-external-hard-drive.html Plug in empty USB HD, Install SL to USB, boot off of USB.