File Recovery From Corrupted OSX

I have a late 2011 15" MBP with a 750GB HD, 8GB DDR3 Ram, and running Mountain Lion.

Earlier this week I was having a lot of trouble during startup and intermittent performance problems afterwards. I tracked the issue down to an invalid node structure and and attempted to repair the problem using the disk utility.

The repair failed and following then attempt I was no longer able to boot into the mac partition. I was, however, able to boot into bootcamp and found most of the files were accessible though windows.

Using the disk manager I took a look at the drive itself and it appeared to be fine, just inactive. I set it to active again, rebooted into the recovery drive and attempted to rerun the repair again. It failed, and when I attempted to boot back into windows I received a "missing operating system" error.

I am ready to call it and re-install OSX, but I need to get my files off the mac partition. I attempted to take an image and move it to an external drive, but the disk utility in the recovery drive failed.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to get my unbacked-up files off the drive before I do this I would really appreciate it.

Using the disk manager I took a look at the drive itself and it appeared to be fine, just inactive. I set it to active again, rebooted into the recovery drive and attempted to rerun the repair again. It failed, and when I attempted to boot back into windows I received a "missing operating system" error.

Click to expand...

Yep, wrong thing to do. You don't set an OS X partition to "active" as that only works with Windows partitions and besides, Disk Manager is not the right tool to use on OS X.

Right now it looks like you're going to need to use a Data Recovery tool to try and extract your files from the damaged Macintosh HD partition. Make sure you have another Mac handy that you can boot from and space to extract the data.

Data Rescue 3

Disk Drill Pro

I believe both apps have a demo which you should download first to make sure it works for you. Both programs work well but are not inexpensive.