Recovering Data

[quakerboy87]

Howdie,

My ibook is sick and I am getting ready to reformat the hard drive. I have backed-up most things by there are a bunch of movies of my new baby that I haven't backed up. Is there any way to make the ibook act like an external hard drive so I can pull the data off? (It boots up normal but then freezes after 3 seconds) If I reformat I will lose everything right?

Much appreciated.

 

[Makosuke]

Yes, if you reformat the drive you'll lose everything on it, so you definitely want to back up.

If you have a firewire cable, you can use Target Disk Mode--hook the iBook (off) to another Mac (on) via a FireWire cable, power up the iBook while holding down the T key, and it should mount on the other computer as if it were an external hard drive. You should be able to copy stuff off without it freezing this way, unless the drive itself is dying.

Apple's documentation:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583