Best way to recover a mac harddisk from a windows machine?

[Czar]

My niece has a macbook and an external disk which ended up being connected to a pc. The person doing that did something so when she opens up the disk on her mac nothing comes up and when I open it on my pc the disk shows up, gets a drive letter but an unreadable filesystem (which it asks me if I want to format it).

If it were a ntfs or fat volume I would know what to do but with a mac I'm a bit lost.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: Czar
My niece has a macbook and an external disk which ended up being connected to a pc. The person doing that did something so when she opens up the disk on her mac nothing comes up and when I open it on my pc the disk shows up, gets a drive letter but an unreadable filesystem (which it asks me if I want to format it).

If it were a ntfs or fat volume I would know what to do but with a mac I'm a bit lost.

You can use MacDrive to get the files off, but then reformat it either FAT32 or NTFS.

OS X can read NTFS by default, but not write to it. You can install MacFUSE + NTFS3G to get write capabilities, the biggest kicker is that speeds are cut in half, but you get write access. You can pay for ParagonNTFS for OS X, which will give you full write speed, and better formatting capabilities, but as I said, you have to buy it.

 

[Nothinman]

If it were a ntfs or fat volume I would know what to do but with a mac I'm a bit lost.

Are you sure it wasn't a FAT volume in the first place?

Personally, I'd plug it into a Linux machine (or boot a LiveCD) and see what filesystem it says is on there. That'll at least give you a starting point.

 

[Czar]

The thing is I have no real idea of what type of partition was on there to begin with since the owner is not that computer savy.

I tried to scan the disk using TestDisk and I think it found a hfs partition but since you start the program by telling it what type of partition is on there to begin with and then scan it I'm not sure if its a hfs partition or not.

 

[Nothinman]

I tried to scan the disk using TestDisk and I think it found a hfs partition but since you start the program by telling it what type of partition is on there to begin with and then scan it I'm not sure if its a hfs partition or not.

That's why I suggested a Linux LiveCD, you can bootup and run 'file -s /dev/blah' and it'll use the "magic" in the filesystem to figure out what kind it is.

i.e.

# file -s /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: Linux rev 1.0 ext2 filesystem data (mounted or unclean), UUID=8201f8f8-ed17-4d90-adf4-a7f3a020b07d, volume name "boot"

 

[mugs]

SpinRite will fix many drive issues, and it doesn't care what filesystem you're using.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

 

[Nothinman]

SpinRite will fix many drive issues, and it doesn't care what filesystem you're using.

Except that from what the OP said it most likely is a filesystem issue...

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

SpinRite will fix many drive issues, and it doesn't care what filesystem you're using.

Except that from what the OP said it most likely is a filesystem issue...

He actually said that Windows told him it was an unreadable filesystem, which I think makes sense if it was formatted for a Mac.

But even if it is a filesystem issue, SpinRite could fix it - e.g. if the filesystem issue is caused by unreadable sectors.

And really, SpinRite is a great tool to have and to use on your drives regularly.

 

[Nothinman]

He actually said that Windows told him it was an unreadable filesystem, which I think makes sense if it was formatted for a Mac.

Which is why I suggested running 'file' on it from a Linux LiveCD since that's a quick way to tell which filesystem is on it.

But even if it is a filesystem issue, SpinRite could fix it - e.g. if the filesystem issue is caused by unreadable sectors.

But that would be a hard disk issue, not a filesystem issue.

 

[mugs]

OK, I really don't care to argue with you. We don't know what the issue is and have no reason to believe it's a filesystem issue. I suggested a very good disk utility that often fixes unknown drive issues and could fix this one. That's all. I'm done.

 

[Czar]

no need to argue, you are both offering good advice

 

[Czar]

I tried the live cd (ubuntu 9), did file on the usb disk and it just returns "data" and in GParted it shows the file system just as unknown

 

[Nothinman]

You did the partition and not the whole disk, right? Although even if you did the disk it should've told you what kind of partition table is on there.

 

[Czar]

haha it worked

used testdisk, scanned it using the first selection (intel) so no need to select mac, it detected the disk like before and just had to tell it to write the hsf partition it found


testdisk is awesome