Faulty hard drive - work-around for retrieving data from external drive?

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Faulty hard drive - work-around for retrieving data from external drive?

I have an SSD MBP. This morning I started having the blinking folder problem. Tried clean install via Cmd R - hard drive not recognized. Disk utility shows Disk 0 and base system. My Lacie Rugged external harddrive recognized.

Here's the thing: I really only need the data on the Lacie Rugged. Problem is, it only has a thunderbolt and an eSATA connection (which they advertise as a USB connection, but it's actually an eSATA port with USB capability or something). The faulty MBP is my only computer with thunderbolt and I have no eSATA cables. My other computers - 6-year old imac with firewire and USB, 2010 lenovo with usb and ethernet. I only have ethernet-ethernet and usb to usb cables at home.

Is there someway I can 1) boot the base system, 2) daisy chain the old imac to faulty mbp to external drive, 3) do an install of OSX on the lacie external drive and then boot from that, to get the data? Other suggestions?

This is not a Christmas puzzler, it's real.

J.

MacBook Pro with Retina display

Posted on Dec 25, 2015 4:55 AM

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Answer 1

Glitzernes Author

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Dec 25, 2015 5:22 AM in response to Glitzernes

So far; I thought I'd install osx on a thumb drive, but 16 gb is needed and I only have 8 gb. I tried connecting the faulty mbp to the old imac, but nothing was recognized.

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Answer 2

Dec 25, 2015 7:51 AM in response to Glitzernes

Can you boot to target disk mode and access the mbp as an external drive?

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Answer 3

Eric Root

Level 10

685,341 points

Dec 25, 2015 8:46 AM in response to Glitzernes

Target Disk Mode - Mavericks

You can make a bootable USB stick to install using this free program which will do all the work for you. It works on an 8 GB thumb drive.

Bootable USB Flash Drive – Diskmaker X

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Answer 4

Glitzernes Author

Level 1

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Dec 25, 2015 9:29 PM in response to Glitzernes

Thanks all for the replies. The priority was accessing a project in my virtual Windows machine. I ended up getting the Lenovo working at an acceptable speed by disabling a bunch of "features" - half-baked copies of OSX stuff - in Windows 7, updating/installing the necessary programs, borrowing a friend's MBP and temporarily installing Parallels on it to get the files I needed. It took about 10 hours all up. Equalling over €400 in earnings lost. Could have been done in just a couple of hours were it not for all the proprietary ports and interfaces, lack of backward compatibility, and software bugs.

It's actually a bit of a wake-up call. €600 on an iPhone5 that works for a year before the wifi breaking - a known bug - and apple refuses to honor the warranty because you didn't buy an extended guarantee that the eu courts had already ruled as illegal (there's automatic 2 year warranty on consumer products in Europe, apple is charging for a product consumers already have), then iPhone6 that wipes calendar entries two minutes after input, also a known bug for over 4 years, an Mbp with dead pixels, dodgy hdmi port and now a failed HD, an iMac with moisture damage behind the glass screen, The top-dollar Lenovo that was literally slower than the 3 year old budget laptop it was supposed to replace, a line of 4-in-1's that can't scan a straight page, which somehow not one of the rave reviews on the Internet mentions, and not to start on leading software programs so unstable that cranking out your publication on a printing press would have been less time consuming.

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