The easiest way to recover your files from a Mac:
If you hard drive has failed on your IMac or apple laptop and is it not booting then Do This To Recover Your Files:
1. Put your device into Target Disk Mode. (You can enter Target Disk Mode by rebooting your Mac and holding down the T key as it boots)
2. Connect your Mac via a Firewire or Thunderbolt cable to another Mac (lets call it the Second Mac)
3. Open Finder in the Second Mac,
4. Look for the First Mac’s “Macintosh HD” under Devices and click on it to open it
5. Located the “Users” folder, Your files and documents are under “Users” folder
6. Drag them to another location in you Second Mac.
7. You have now recovered your documents.
8. Disconnect the First Mac and take it to an apple store where they will charge you $200-$300 to change the hard drive.
9. Back up your files on the Second Mac
Macs can boot into a “Target Disk Mode” that causes them to function like an external hard drive. Connect one Mac to another Mac and you can access its files in the Finder.
Target Disk Mode works with Macs, so you’ll need two Macs for this. Each Mac needs either a Thunderbolt port or a Firewire port.
While in Target Disk Mode, your Mac will act as an external drive and appear in the Finder on your other Mac.
All its internal partitions will appear if it has multiple partitions.
Look for an external drive named “Macintosh HD.” You can click the drive and copy files back and forth like you would with a normal external drive.
