Can't see /Users files when mouting drive on other Mac

[Sn4fu]

Hi,

first the background of this problem: My sister managed to spill water over her macbook, of course she has no backup and exams at university coming up in a few days.. So me, being a nice brother, promised her to recover her files. Well, after laughing at her for not having a backup

I am still able to connect to the macbook (mainly the graphic card seems to be broken, neither primary screen nor external monitors work) via eth cable, but can't access any shared folder. Bonjour shows the mac, but it drops connections due to "invalid user /pw" (and I checked these dozen of times..) Also connecting via target mode & firewire did not work. So I opened the mac, removed the harddrive and plugged it into some SATA-USB connector - it was recognized immediately. My computer is a mac mini with osx 10.9.3 (as far as I remember, the broken macbook had at least any 10.9.x version installed.

Now the confusing part comes:

"du -sh /path/to/external/Volume/Users" results in the output
408G Users/

which seems to be about as much data as it should contain. But an "ls -al" on /Users/$name shows no content. Also any "du -sh" on a subdirectory of ../Users does not show where the data could be hidden.

Unfortunately, I do not know if she uses file vault.

Any help finding and recovering the files would be great

 

[Altemose]

Hi,

first the background of this problem: My sister managed to spill water over her macbook, of course she has no backup and exams at university coming up in a few days.. So me, being a nice brother, promised her to recover her files. Well, after laughing at her for not having a backup

I am still able to connect to the macbook (mainly the graphic card seems to be broken, neither primary screen nor external monitors work) via eth cable, but can't access any shared folder. Bonjour shows the mac, but it drops connections due to "invalid user /pw" (and I checked these dozen of times..) Also connecting via target mode & firewire did not work. So I opened the mac, removed the harddrive and plugged it into some SATA-USB connector - it was recognized immediately. My computer is a mac mini with osx 10.9.3 (as far as I remember, the broken macbook had at least any 10.9.x version installed.

Now the confusing part comes:

"du -sh /path/to/external/Volume/Users" results in the output
408G Users/

which seems to be about as much data as it should contain. But an "ls -al" on /Users/$name shows no content. Also any "du -sh" on a subdirectory of ../Users does not show where the data could be hidden.

Unfortunately, I do not know if she uses file vault.

Any help finding and recovering the files would be great

Try installing the iTunes 11.2.1 update on her hard drive. There was a bug which hid the Users folder for Mavericks users in iTunes 11.2.

 

[Weaselboy]

Unfortunately, I do not know if she uses file vault.

Any help finding and recovering the files would be great

She does not have FV on, or you would not even be able to see anything on the drive or get as far as you have.

Select her drive in Finder then do a command-i to bring up the get info pane, then at the bottom check the box to ignore permissions on the disk. That should allow you to see what you want in Finder.