Hi folks,
I've been issued a sort of an odd challenge and am hoping for some assistance. I am normally a windows guy and do PC repair as a hobby(my day job is HPC repair). My sister(who is a mac family) recently brought me an old external hard drive and asked if I could try and recover the data from it. Its a backup of her macbook circa 2009.
The drive itself is a 300gb PATA drive. I ran it through my normal battery of tests and it appears to be mechanically sound. It detects just fine internally. My guess is its old(probably about 15 years) and drawing more power than an external enclosure can now provide(I tried it on 2 of them). Windows of course cannot even "see" that there is a partition on the drive, and I don't have a linux box with PATA headers.
Now, the only Mac I own is a Graphite dual G4 I've been tinkering with(dating from about the year 2000). It detects the drive fine but cannot really "see" any files on it. This is where I've gotten stuck: from terminal df shows there should be about 220gb used on the drive, but I am having no luck exploring the files from commandline(its juuuuuuust different enough from linux to break my meager commandline-fu). I did find some steps for exposing hidden files and that made it clear frm the GUI that there is some stuff on the drive, but I am not having a lot of luck exposing any of it.
So I guess the question is where do I go from here? Unfortunately no one I know has a newer mac desktop the drive could be installed in. This is a bit outside my comfort zone but I'm happy to expand.
Any suggestions?
EDIT: it appears this external was used as a "time machine" once upon a time. I am vaguely aware that is a mac backup protocol.
I've been issued a sort of an odd challenge and am hoping for some assistance. I am normally a windows guy and do PC repair as a hobby(my day job is HPC repair). My sister(who is a mac family) recently brought me an old external hard drive and asked if I could try and recover the data from it. Its a backup of her macbook circa 2009.
The drive itself is a 300gb PATA drive. I ran it through my normal battery of tests and it appears to be mechanically sound. It detects just fine internally. My guess is its old(probably about 15 years) and drawing more power than an external enclosure can now provide(I tried it on 2 of them). Windows of course cannot even "see" that there is a partition on the drive, and I don't have a linux box with PATA headers.
Now, the only Mac I own is a Graphite dual G4 I've been tinkering with(dating from about the year 2000). It detects the drive fine but cannot really "see" any files on it. This is where I've gotten stuck: from terminal df shows there should be about 220gb used on the drive, but I am having no luck exploring the files from commandline(its juuuuuuust different enough from linux to break my meager commandline-fu). I did find some steps for exposing hidden files and that made it clear frm the GUI that there is some stuff on the drive, but I am not having a lot of luck exposing any of it.
So I guess the question is where do I go from here? Unfortunately no one I know has a newer mac desktop the drive could be installed in. This is a bit outside my comfort zone but I'm happy to expand.
Any suggestions?
EDIT: it appears this external was used as a "time machine" once upon a time. I am vaguely aware that is a mac backup protocol.