Hey guys! I'm currently in the process of attempting to recover data off of a friend's Macbook Pro that will not boot. For some reason (I'm assuming they either had a tendency to simply power it off instead of shutting down, or that their hard drive is beginning to fail), the file system has been messed up. I cannot fix it with the disk utility in recovery mode, and the fsck command recommended when booting into single user mode is unsuccessful (I can get the exact errors later if anyone cares). Despite this issue, I believe I can still mount the drive and access files (although I'm not sure how many files are(n't) intact). My question is will mounting and accessing the files potentially corrupt them as the filesystem isn't in an ideal state.
tl;dr: Will mounting and accessing files from a corrupt filesystem further corrupt the files themselves?
Thanks in advance!
When the system is off, press the power button, then immediately press and hold the Option key before the startup tone happens. Hold until you get the boot up options. there should be 2 if the OS is within 3 yrs old. choose the recovery partition. when it gets to an option of what to do, choose disk utility. Click on the partition in need of repair. click repair disk and possibly repair permissions if needed
If that does not work, Macs have an awesome feature that will enable you to recover data without removing the HDD. Its called target mode. it requires another Mac, but it effectively turns the Mac requiring attention into an external HDD
I already tried in the recovery mode (as I mentioned in the original post), and unfortunately, I don't have a firewire or thunderbolt cable. I am primarily concerned with any negative side effects of mounting the partition even though the filesystem isn't in an ideal condition. Thanks for replying!
I was checking bases. No worries. What errors do you get with disk utility in recovery? Mounting the drive won't corrupt it more. If the drive is failing then powering it off then on repeatedly will damage it.
If recovery mode is not working, on that case you can go to third party utility like Mac OS X Recovery. This app does not work with file system; it simply recovers the data from hard drive without using file system of the hard drive. To know more about it check this page: http://www.macosxrecovery.net/recover-hfsx-volume-files-after-volume-header-corruption-on-os-x-lion.html