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Recover files from a MAC G5 that will not boot

I have a MAC G5 that will not boot and the user would like to get all the user files recovered from this drive.

If the drive is not physically bad I would like to connect the hard drive up to a USB to SATA harneess that I use all the time when I recover Windows based hard drives that will not boot etc..

My question is:
I assume I would want to connect this USB to SATA hard drive to another MAC OS X system (I could have access to 10.4 (Tiger) and possibly 10.5 Leopard systems. Once I do this, how would I go about finding the files and copying them. Can I see the hard drive attached via USB to SATA cable like I do in my Windows recovery work I do? Where would I go to view the hard drives files etc.. Can I just copy the files to local MAC (then burn to DVD).

I have done a bit of work on MACs (Leopard to Snow Leopard updates, RAM updgrades etc. but do mostly Windows work in past).

Also, do you know if I were to connect a MAC G5's system hard drive to a windows 7 (XP or Vista System) with a SATA to USB adaptor is there a way to recover files? I assume I have to conect to MAC system as desribed above but I am not sure...

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

David

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SOLUTION

Parrish Chamberlain

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David

For the record, #B is a violation of Apple's licensing. OSX is only licensed for use on Apple hardware. However, you can run virtualbox under OSX, or parallels, or vmware, and create a windows VM, and the windows VM will have access to the entire HDD if you set it up, so then you could effectively mount the mac volume and put it on an ActiveDirectory network.

(But you still would not get same permissions, and will lose some things from NTFS side. The only correct thing that insures a proper & complete copy is to make a binary image and use the copy on a Mac.

SOLUTION

strung

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SOLUTION

nxnw

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rarbsmith

Leave the drive in the mac and boot in Target mode by pressing and holding T when you boot up. Connect a firewire cable to another Mac and copy the files like it were a Firewire LaCie drive.

rdwolf

ASKER

Thanks for all the solutions. I ended up just using a USB harness to another Mac and just copying the files over. THis worked fine.

The other solutoins were also helpful as well.