copying an Apple Mac Hard Drive from a dead mac? - macos

I have little experience with macs so I thought I would ask a quick question before I go ahead with this.
My friend's 6 year old mac desktop died the other day, she took it into the tech guys at the apple store to find out if she can get her documents back and they said no because the hard drive is in a different code you can't take it out.
That sounds like a load of crap to me so I want to rip out the hard drive and plug it into my PC then copy everything over. I also have access to linux if I need to.
So is there anything I need to know before doing this?
Thanks!

Assuming the hard drive itself isn't dead, you can get your hands on something like Ubuntu and copy all the files onto a different hard drive. You usually can't do this from windows because windows uses NTFS file system and will not recognize the mac file system (HFS or HFSPlus). Most flavors of linux can recognize mac hard drives and copy the contents. There can be some tricks with ownership of the files so here's a good post on how to do this in ubuntu:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-852144.html
Hope that helps!

If your friend plans on buying a new Mac, you should keep the disk itself; with an external HDD enclosure, a new machine (or a new OSX installation) will be able to migrate basically everything from the old drive.

Late answer, I know, but I just rescued a broken mac disk using dd_rescue, booting Trinity 3.4 on a HP and cloning the broken disk to a working disk. Then I popped the working disk into a working mac and hey presto, the user got the files back.

Related

Windows 10 Installation on a SSD error: " We couldn't create a new partition..."

I have an Acer Nitro 5 with a Gigabyte 512gb ssd and a WD 1TB hhd.
Recently after installing Ubuntu on my hdd (because i didn't want to change the sata mode), I also wanted a clean Windows install. So I created a boot usb from
media creation tool and go forward with it.
It didn't work. I got the "We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one" error, which i spent a significant amount of time trying to search for a solution.
Stuffs i tried:
- Format my ssd
- use diskpart to clean, convert my ssd partition table to gpt, etc like every guide online recommends.
- Make another boot usb, this time with rufus. Didn't work.
Stuffs I didn't try:
- Temporarily disconnect my hdd. I don't have the tools to do that physically, and my acer uefi has zero options regarding this, like most guides suggests.
- Change to bios-legacy boot mode. There's no option in the uefi.
I think it would be fine if i try to install windows on my hdd though, but haven't try it yet. All I know is installing windows on a ssd is much harder but didn't expect it to produce this much annoyance.
I heard there's an option to install on a HDD, the. use a third party tool to copy it to a SSD, but i haven't look into it.
Thanks for any help given..
Assuming you have Windows 10 installed and working on your SSD go to Settings > Update & Security > Recovery > Reset this PC > Get started and then select if you want your files kept you want clean reinstall. Again - from your post I assume the latter so just click Remove everything" confirm and wait. It will take (depending on the machine) 1-2 hours.
I've found this to be the easiest way to have clean install without wondering how do I get it installed on my laptop/pc.
My recommendation though - back up your ubuntu partition - I can't guarantee that windows installer won't clean up HDD you have (it's supposed to clean only SSD but better be safe than sorry).
Here's the link to detailed instructions. It's based on 1903 compilation - if your's older it will still look very similar.
If your windows isn't working then use diskpart to clean the drive, boot the computer from USB windows installation stick and choose the drive for your installation - it will/should create appropriate partitions and start installing.
If it won't change boot order so the SSD is first on the list and HDD next and repeat the previous step.

Running SAS 9.4 from a flash drive

I have downloaded the SAS 9.4 suite on a flash drive. However, I do not have enough space on my hard disk to install SAS on my laptop.
Is there a way I can run SAS from my flash drive, instead of installing it on my laptop?
Operating system : Windows 10
Sort of? I have an external drive I've formatted (SSD/Flash) with an entire OS on it including SAS.
So I have VMware installed on my computer and it accesses the image file stored on the flash drive/SSD to run. You may even be able to do this with SAS UE. But you can also just use Academics on Demand which is cloud-based, assuming it's non-commercial usage and for learning.
EDIT: It's on a (256GB) flash drive that I keep on my computer because I don't really use the SD slot for anything else. It has Windows 10 on it because my main machine is a MacBook.

StoreMI - Create Bootable StoreMI greyed out

Situation: New PC Build
- Windows 10
- Samsung Evo 970 256GB NVME
- WD Blue 1TB potato drive
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X on Asus Crosshair VII Hero
- GTX 1070
One of the main benefits of Ryzen 2, for me, was the StoreMI feature that I really hope to get working. I watched AdoredTV's video of how he set his up, but unfortunately for me, I'm not having any luck.
Greyed Out no option to create Bootable StoreMI
I have gone into Windows Disk Management and made sure the drives are visible to the OS, and they are also visible in File Explorer.
Windows Sees the Drives
If I try to remove fast media, I get this message, and the program closes.
If I try to modify, I get nothing useful.
So...I need some help figuring out what I've done wrong. Could I have something in the BIOS I need to fix? Other? I'm at a total loss.
Edit 1) I may have another clue? One of my greyed out drives is the same drive as the drive that's selectable, and they're "both" in a Tier. Looking at the Disk Manager, it seems my "System Reserved" is for some reason on the NVMe drive when it should have...I would have thought...been installed on the same drive the OS was installed on. I know I didn't tell Windows to do this.
So maybe this is a clue? Can I move the "System Reserved" Partition over to the spinning rust? Would that help?
Same Drive occupies both tiers?
Ok, well AMD customer support never emailed me back. It's been about 48 hours now. Not counting the RTFM email which was useless.
So...I figured...Maybe I'll ask the people I learned the most about this from, either AdoredTV, or Level1Techs. So I went to the Level1Techs forum, and talked to Wendell himself. He diagnosed and suggested a fix (that worked) in about 5 minutes. On my Windows install, I selected the C: (slow) drive to install the OS on, however, the OS set up the "System Reserved" partition on the NVMe drive...even though I never said to do that...it never asked if that's what I wanted to do...It just did it. Effectively nullifying the ability of StoreMI to work.
Why AMD can't do what a youtuber can in 5 minutes is beyond me...and pretty inexcusable. But I digress...
What I had to do was start over. Backed everything up, inserted my Windows 10 installation USB, booted from that, and ****-F10 into a command line from there.
From there, I cleaned all my drives.
Next, I physically removed my NVMe from the motherboard, then went about reinstalling the OS on the slow drive...now the only drive in the system, so it was forced to partition that.
Once that was done, and the OS was completely installed, I shut down the system and reinstalled the NVMe.
Rebooted the system, and I was then able to configure StoreMI easily.
TLDR: If you are doing a new system build, with a fresh Windows install, and want to use StoreMI... My recommendation is to install ONLY one HDD into your system (AMD recommends the install take place on the slowest drive). Complete your Windows install, then install the remaining drive or drives (you can only use two drives with StoreMI), install StoreMI and configure.

Any tool that can confirm if a drive with raw partition is part of a ZFS pool?

I have a client issue that I am working on with a stack of SSD drives and a machine that they were previously installed in. As of now, the stack of drives shows up in a few Operating Systems (Win10, Win7, Mac OSX) as an unpartitioned raw space. I am looking for a simple way to examine the drive and see if it is actually raw, or just formatted for ZFS.
Does anyone know of a Windows or Mac Utility that could help? I've tried a few recovery software programs, that hinted at being compatible with ZFS formatted drives, but have yet to see anything that would indicate if it was actually a ZFS, or simply not formatted.
Regards,
Ed
ZFS is storing at the start and at the end of each device a magic number, 0x00bab10c ("oobabloc", i.e. überblock), reversed for little-endian: 0x0cb1ba00.
So if this number doesn't appear in the device data, you can be sure it isn't used by ZFS. If it does appear, you need to investigate a little further.
For details, have a look to the ZFS on disk specification draft available here, especially page 13.

All partitions missing when copying

I bought a new 320GB SATA hard drive few months ago no recently when i try to copy something to the drive after about 20 seconds the all the partitions in the hard drive suddenly disappears.
The hard drive is not shown in either Disk manager or device manager. To get the HD work i have to restart the PC again.The same thing happens when i try to copy. Even when i play any audio or video after abt 5 minutes i get the same problem.
The drives are NTFS and im running Windows XP.. Xan some one please help me solve the problem??
did you check all the wires ? sounds like a disconnect of the wire somehow ... otherwise the hdd is broken...
The problem was the ide hard drive that i had connected, there seems to be a speed issue. Changing the ide to a different sata drive solved it

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