External Hard Drive trouble and using a MAC

[repoman]

how do you do that with a mac?

 

[NobleSavage]

Mac has a full bash terminal. Applications -> Utilities - Terminal

Then just type in the terminal: diskutil

That will give a list of all the options for diskutil. To get a list of all drives you would do: diskutil list

If that doesn't do much you can install Homebrew or MacPorts (you basically need to pick one or the other... I went down the Homebrew rabbit hole) and get most of the Unix/Linux command line utilities.

http://brew.sh/

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

If you can get to Linux/Unix command line utilities, you may want to google DD DD allows raw writes bit by bit. So if you had a hard disk to save, attach a second USB hard disk and us DD to copy what is readable from disk A to disk B. If disk A is failing, you may not be able to recover all of hard disk A. There are Linux live CDs such as Clonezilla that allow such things in the PC world, I don't know what is considered good for such rescues in the Mac world. DD's bit by bit copying does not rely on any specific file system, so it will also copy corrupted files, but also won't halt if for some reason it doesn't understand a corrupted partition table et al. So it may be a mess to sort out even if it saves data.

If the hard disk is too far gone, this won't work. If the disks are sound but the hd's electronics are bad, this won't work.

If this was me, I'd not try to access it again until I had considered my options and was ready to implement a plan.

 

[NobleSavage]

If you can get to Linux/Unix command line utilities, you may want to google DD DD allows raw writes bit by bit. So if you had a hard disk to save, attach a second USB hard disk and us DD to copy what is readable from disk A to disk B. If disk A is failing, you may not be able to recover all of hard disk A. There are Linux live CDs such as Clonezilla that allow such things in the PC world, I don't know what is considered good for such rescues in the Mac world. DD's bit by bit copying does not rely on any specific file system, so it will also copy corrupted files, but also won't halt if for some reason it doesn't understand a corrupted partition table et al. So it may be a mess to sort out even if it saves data.

If the hard disk is too far gone, this won't work. If the disks are sound but the hd's electronics are bad, this won't work.

If this was me, I'd not try to access it again until I had considered my options and was ready to implement a plan.

Good thinking on DD. It *should* be installed by default on Mac (if not, easy to get). I've used it several times to make bootable Linux USBs . First, repoman needs to use "diskutil list". If he can see the drive/volume and then try "diskutil mountDisk device." If that works, then he could move everything with DD. Diskutil also has repair options and other helpful things. http://ss64.com/osx/diskutil.html