HD Issue: Booting from External HD - Need to save data

[legaleye3000]

For some reason my MACINTOSH HD will not boot and also will not show when holding down the option key when booting. So I installed 10.13 on an external drive and I am booting directly from that. When going into Disk Utility, the drive shows up but First Aid immediately fails by just saying, "An internal error has occurred".

Also, the drive is no longer called MACINTOSH HD and is now just disk0s2 (PCI Internal APFS Physical Store). Interestingly, my Boot Camp partition still shows and works on the same hard drive. I don't care about saving the macOS installation, etc. I just need some files off of my desktop.

ANY HELP APPRECIATED! Thanks!

 

[chscag]

Unless you can access your Macintosh HD with recovery software (Disk Warrior, Data Rescue, Disk Drill, etc) you may not be able to copy or extract anything from the drive. How about your backups? Can you see anything on the drive when booted to Windows?

 

[legaleye3000]

Windows doesn’t show the drive, although I’m not sure if the Mac partition was readable from windows anyway when it was working, I just found disk drill and it’s scanning right now(going to take a long time). It appears it’s finding tons of files, however, I’m hoping there is a way to just look at files that were on my desktop...

 

[chscag]

Unfortunately, none of the recovery software that I'm familiar with will be able to specifically list files from one area or another only. All them do a scan and list everything on the drive that it can find. It's a real PITA to sort it all out especially if your drive was fairly full.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

It would help if you told us:
- Which Mac you own
- What year made
- What kind of drive inside.