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I booted into recovery HD mode via cmd-r and ran repair disk which failed and prompted me to erase. Since the system worked normally before, I wanted to reboot and save all my files. Now the reboot is stuck during the apple logo. Again, I booted into recovery and tried fsck via terminal, which told me everything is okay with system abse. But, I still can not boot into OSX.

Is it possible to still get into the OS, or save the data out of recovery? I do have a external HD. Can I somehow backup my data out of recovery?

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1)Try booting to the OS X Install disc. If you can do that, them you can open a shell and try mounting your external drive and copying your data off that way.

2)Since you booted to the hard drive, it's possibly you can just mount your external drive from the recovery shell, then copy your data off there.

If the drive truly is shot you may run into errors when copying off, but that is to be expected.

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  • Didn't know you could get to a shell from their disc, good idea! +1
    – nerdwaller
    Jan 11, 2013 at 14:50
  • thanks.i managed to detect the external drive in disk utility. i then tried to create a disk image of the corrupted partition. it took ages for the progressbar to reach 50%, after that i didnt watch for a while and all of the sudden it seem to be finished. but no prompts with success messages. should i retry it? AND> I got a dmg file now. can i erase and reinstall macosx and migrate the dmg file through mirgation assistent? couldnt find anz answer on the internet for that
    – Alexander Hensel
    Jan 11, 2013 at 20:43
  • I don't know if you can migrate a dmg file, as it's an image file that (to my understanding) is meant to be burned. I would explicitly try to copy individual files off the drive, since the only way to know if that image is good is to lay it back down, and chances are it's probably corrupted too.
    – MDMoore313
    Jan 11, 2013 at 20:51
  • yeah that seem reasonable. but since ivegot the dmg file on the external i still can open it and get the suer files out of it. im gonna go ahead and trz to migrate it tho.
    – Alexander Hensel
    Jan 11, 2013 at 20:54
  • another question: when creating an image i can choose whether it should be compressed, read only, r&w, or DVD/CD master.Which one should i choose?
    – Alexander Hensel
    Jan 11, 2013 at 21:02
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On a Mac you have a few options, but I'll summarize the easiest two I can think of:

1) Download (on another computer obviously) a Linux Live Disc. Put in in your Mac (I am hoping you have a disc drive), and boot from it. Then, through the file browser you should be able to locate all the files you want to back up, copy them to the external drive (Linux supports write to most formats other than HFS [apple]).

If whatever Linux you download doesn't read the Mac partition, do a quick Google search to enable HFS+ read on it. (Ubuntu is probably the simplest)

2) If you have access to another Mac (and a firewire), you can put the "broken" one in Target disc mode by holding T during boot. You'll see a FireWire icon on your screen, and then you should be able to mount it on the working machine and back everything up.

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Just went through a similar fix on a 5 yr old Alum PB G4. Thought my disk was shot.

For peace of mind, I'd see if you could find another Mac which had DiskWarrior on it and try it on your disk. Seriously - and I'm not one to initially gravitate to commercial product for a fix - but DW is a really great tool with a great rep in the Mac world. I had 'badblocks' (read) checked my disk from my GNU/Linux (main) system and when I saw no bad sectors/blocks reported I figured it was a serious directory issue (disk was unbootable) which indeed it turned out to be. DW not only fixed many directory issues, but recovered a significant amount of disk space on the disk.

Really, before I'd do anything with a disk problem again (on a Mac), I would not take action unless I knew the result of a DiskWarrior test. I was fortunate that I had a Senior Admin friend at a school district who tested and fixed my disk for me. I don't own DW or work for Alsoft. I was fortunately able to copy my home dir (home) off the disk when I had it hooked to my Linux box before I gave it to my friend.

PS Extracting a disk from an Alum PB is really (really) NOT fun..lol

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  • thanks, but i dont think i can pulled that off. all ive got are two macs and one external drive. one mac with the corrupted drive. how can disk warrior help me out_
    – Alexander Hensel
    Jan 11, 2013 at 20:46

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