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Recover files with external hard drive before restore
- Thread starter BertieWooster96
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I can boot into the El Capitan installer (and get no further) but not into safe mode.
From that installer screen, can you access Disk Utility? If you can, go to the Edit menu and select Retore then select the old drive as the source and the external as the destination and click restore. That should clone the internal to the external. It will still be broken and not bootable from your other problems, but the data folders should be there and available once you get the system back up and running.
Do I not need to change the format of the external drive so it is compatible with the Mac first then?
Thanks for the reply. My plan is to recover my files, restore my MBP to factory settings, then transfer my files back across.
Yes and I should have mentioned that. Just use Disk Utility to format the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) first.
Formatted my drive to Extended (Journaled)
I went Edit-Restore and have been presented with this screen (attached) with the options of: ST9250... media, Apple disk image media, and Apple disk image media. I imagine I am right restoring from ST9250... media?
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Yep... the way you have it in that screenshot is what you want and will clone the internal to the external.
I've tried that and it says this.
I had the Samsung M3 Portable Media selected and not the part below it that I had formatted if that makes a difference.
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Try again with Macintosh HD as the source and Aimee as the destination. Make sure you formatted Aimee to Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
It's restoring now as I type.
Thanks for your help, I'm being so careful (and n00bish) because of my precious files. I know to set up Time Machine in the future!
How do I go about wiping my MBP after this?
Oh good....
You want to wipe the presumably bad internal drive just so nobody can get your data? While in that recovery screen just select Macintosh HD and in the erase to reformat the partition. If you click security options there is an option there to overwrite the drive with data to make it a moe secure erase, but be aware that can take a long time depending on which option you choose.