08-21-2008, 10:57 AM

Ok, here's the scoop-

I have a friend with a 1.2CPU G4 tower. Unfortunately, he hasn't backed up his data. And right on cue, yesterday his drive started failing on startup.
When I tried to help him with running all of the standard utilities, we got the dreaded B Tree Catalog issue, disk can't be repaired, etc.

So, here's the issue. At this point, recovering the drive without erasing & reformatting doesn't seem to be an option.
My friend's biggest concern is retrieving the personal data (photos, music, etc.) So I hooked his Mac up in "Targer Disk Mode" to my Powerbook via firewire.

Since my Finder doesn't see his drive when in target disk mode, I pulled his hard drive and stuck it in an external firewire drive. Finder still doesn't see the drive, but my disk utility does (with his volume "MacIntosh Hard Drive" greyed out.)

My question is, is it still possible to retrieve his data by creating a disk image of the drive in disk utility?

I want to make sure that this is the best way to store the data before erasing & reformatting. I've got "Super Duper," if that matters.
Any ideas would help!

08-21-2008, 11:06 AM

You are right at the point where you have to make a choice. It has a serious directory error that DU can't fix. Each time you boot it or attempt to fix it the chance of it failing totally goes up. I think you need to look to something like Data Rescue which can pull data off of unmounted drive. Or stronger medicine like DiskWarrior which can repair seriously damaged drives.

08-21-2008, 01:39 PM

Ok, so here's what I did.
After scouring the net for answers, this seemed like the most logical thing to do-
I created a disk image (dmg) of my friend's bad drive using disk utility & placed it on an external drive (it was about 20GB.)
Now I'm running disk utility on the bad drive, doing a 7-pass erase of free space and re-format.

So, my question is- what is the easiest way to retrieve data from the disk image I saved?
Is this where something like Disk Warrior comes in? Or is there a simpler way to read the disk image and retrieve the data?

As I said, obviously the personal files & maybe some application data is what he's most concerned about. When the old/bad drive is deemed clean & healthy, I'll use his Tiger restore disk to re-install the OS.

Thanks again!

08-21-2008, 05:30 PM

I think you can double click the image and open it as a volume on your mac, then grab the data you need (music, photos, etc).

I think that would work? Never tried it so Im not exactly sure.

08-21-2008, 05:57 PM

Should work. Drag all the wanted files to the desktop and then burn to a DVD. When friend has new drive formatted and OS installed, pop the DVD in and drag files to desktop and then new HDD.

Suggest he then get a drive in an external case and backup system and all files with SuperDuper and firewire.

08-21-2008, 08:04 PM

Ok, so far so good. I hooked up the external drive (where I saved the disk image of my friend's bad hard drive) to my Powerbook to check it out.

When I saw the disk image, I simply double-clicked it to see if my Powerbook would open it. Voila! It took it forever (probably 15-20 minutes), but it mounted the disk image and I was able to explore the files that had been on his drive.

ok, last question-
Obviously, it's going to be fine for him to drag the personal files from the disk image to his newly re-formatted internal drive in his G4 tower.

But, what about applications? Is it possible to get those from the disk image to save the time of finding software install disks & re-intalling, re-entering security codes, etc?

Just trying to get the easiest way to do these things so that my buddy (who uses his computer heavily for work as we both work in the music industry) can get up & running as quickly as possilble.

Thanks again for all the help!

08-21-2008, 09:16 PM

Can Migration Assistant handle a disk image? If it can that could pull the apps off onto the new mac. I think it might only handle bootable disk though. Worth a try.

08-21-2008, 11:05 PM

Well you will soon find out by trying. Personally I would do a clean install of the applications.