Help with Terminal

[kingdLo]

Hey MR'ers, i'm trying to help a friend on the other side of the globe with some troubles.

I believe he is running Mavericks to start with. Recently his MBP has decided to shoot the bed and won't boot past the Apple Logo. Not sure if its a hardware failure or something happened with OS X. I got him running Extended diagnostics as I type this. He hasn't backed up in almost 2 years I think so my only option to try is manually copy files with Terminal.

What i'm trying to achieve is copy his /user folder to the external he has, thus preserving all the files he has in the folder. I can get him into Terminal with CMD R but as for the commands I have no idea on what to do. Could someone please type out the exact commands i would have him enter into Terminal to get his user folder backed up onto the external? Any and all help would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

[ocabj]

cp -R <source> <destination>

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/cp.1.html

Prefix the cp with sudo for good measure.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/sudo.8.html

 

[Weaselboy]

I can get him into Terminal with CMD R

If your friend can boot into recovery, the easier way would be to just use Disk Utility from there to clone the entire drive to an external. Just go to the restore tab of Disk Util and drag Macintosh HD to the source field and the external volume to the destination field then click restore.

Then once everything is on the external you can just do a "get info" on the external and check the box to ignore ownership settings on the drive. That will give them free access to anything in the users accounts.