How can I mount an internal drive to a folder in a recovery terminal?

[tawnytim]

I have a macbook here with a corrupt OS as far as I can tell - getting the file folder question mark icon. It's an A1398 but not sure which version of macOS is on it. Anyhow, our external 12+16 dock went up so I'm improvising. I want to see if I can access the user data by mounting the volume to a folder. If that works, and I can access the data, I'll copy it off to a USB drive prior to wiping/reinstalling macOS.

Is what I'm trying to do possible? If this were Linux, I'd know exactly what to do, but I'm a little rusty at the mac versions of linux commands, such as lsblk.

Looks like there's a mount command, as well as diskutil mount, but not sure the differences.

**edit** Now that I'm thinking about it, shouldn't I be able to see the Users folder right from the recovery terminal?

 

[estabya]

I usually use Disk Utility for disk functions since it provides the same functionality, unless you need to add some extra flags. If you boot into recovery mode you should be able to go into disk utility to mount the disk (and any external disk if it doesn’t mount automatically). Then use terminal to copy everything over.

Alternatively if you prefer to use command line you can get a list of the disks with:

diskutil list

Then mount the disk in question with:

diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

with disk1s2 of course being replaced with whatever disk you need to mount.

If you have another intel mac and appropriate Thunderbolt or USB cable you could also boot this one in target disk mode (hold T during boot) and connect it to the other Mac directly as an external disk.

Good luck with the data recovery.

 

[tawnytim]

I usually use Disk Utility for disk functions since it provides the same functionality, unless you need to add some extra flags. If you boot into recovery mode you should be able to go into disk utility to mount the disk (and any external disk if it doesn’t mount automatically). Then use terminal to copy everything over.

Alternatively if you prefer to use command line you can get a list of the disks with:

diskutil list

Then mount the disk in question with:

diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

with disk1s2 of course being replaced with whatever disk you need to mount.

If you have another intel mac and appropriate Thunderbolt or USB cable you could also boot this one in target disk mode (hold T during boot) and connect it to the other Mac directly as an external disk.

Good luck with the data recovery.

My hero!!!! Thanks mate!