OS X ML Upgrade corrupted OS X... need to pull data

[Devie]

Hi guys,

My cousin recently tried upgrading his MBA (2009 HDD, not SSD) from SL to ML and surprise surprise no back ups done. He has wedding photo's and all sorts on there that he really wants to get off.

So currently the MBA boots up with the status bar on the bottom and the rotating gear. It gets about halfway and hangs with just the rotating gear.
He said it went into safe mode once after it failed. And didn't do a backup :/. I couldn't get it to boot into safe mode (with shift IIRC).

I made a boot disc drive and ran got into the disc utility. I tried verify and restore of disc which failed and recommend I backup immediately and reinstall OSX. I attempted attatching an external HDD to backup the disc to no avail, coming up with input/output error. This to me sounds like an issue with my USB technique... running the boot drive and external drive via my Apple keyboard because the Air only has one USB drive.
The thing is I can see the data is still there on the drive when I try to select an image, photos and all are there.

Is there any other method I can try to get this data off? I have heard that I can remote in with another mac to get into it? I had thought of trying to boot OSX from an external drive and pulling the data off that way but I have no idea how to go about this...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Which OS did that MBA come with? If worse comes to worse, you should have either a boot disc or USB recovery media. These should at least allow the Mac to boot. If that works, the next step is to use disk recovery software. I have used Alsoft DiskWarrior in the past, and highly recommend it - unfortunately, I don't know of a way to make it work on Macs lacking optical drives.

 

[JimmakoS]

Hi guys,

My cousin recently tried upgrading his MBA (2009 HDD, not SSD) from SL to ML and surprise surprise no back ups done. He has wedding photo's and all sorts on there that he really wants to get off.

So currently the MBA boots up with the status bar on the bottom and the rotating gear. It gets about halfway and hangs with just the rotating gear.
He said it went into safe mode once after it failed. And didn't do a backup :/. I couldn't get it to boot into safe mode (with shift IIRC).

I made a boot disc drive and ran got into the disc utility. I tried verify and restore of disc which failed and recommend I backup immediately and reinstall OSX. I attempted attatching an external HDD to backup the disc to no avail, coming up with input/output error. This to me sounds like an issue with my USB technique... running the boot drive and external drive via my Apple keyboard because the Air only has one USB drive.
The thing is I can see the data is still there on the drive when I try to select an image, photos and all are there.

Is there any other method I can try to get this data off? I have heard that I can remote in with another mac to get into it? I had thought of trying to boot OSX from an external drive and pulling the data off that way but I have no idea how to go about this...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Another solution is to boot from an Ubuntu Live CD or USB and when you go graphical screen, you can choose the hdd and back up the files you want to an external hdd.

 

[wrldwzrd89]

Another solution is to boot from an Ubuntu Live CD or USB and when you go graphical screen, you can choose the hdd and back up the files you want to an external hdd.

I recommend a different Linux distro for this purpose - Ubuntu certainly works, but it's not suited for disk recovery. Two options are Redo Backup & Recovery (based on Ubuntu: web site, DistroWatch page) and SystemRescueCd (Gentoo-based, web site, DistroWatch page). In any case, the procedure is the same: Boot the distro, save your data, reinstall the OS, restore your data.