Recovering Mac Laptop data

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pennypincher

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I 've been given a Mac Laptop which won't power up,it's burned out the PSU and some of the PCB!However I wanted to try and recover the data(Photos) from the hard drive,what's the best way to do this,I have a Lapttop to IDE hard drive converter but MAC file system is different than windows so I can't just pop it in(my windows machine) as a slave. Do I really need another Mac to recover files form the drive?
 
What Mac OS version? Recent ones presumbly use some Unix filesystem so try booting the PC off a live CD GNU/Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) and see if you can access the drive that way. If your PC filesystem is not NTFS then you should be able to copy directly to your Windows drive. If it is NTFS then you may need to fiddle a bit more or else use another FAT[32] drive for backing up.
 
Assuming it's Mac OS X, since it's an IDE disk this is likely.

Within Ubuntu/Linux/FreeBSD try something like

mount /dev/hdaX /mnt -t hfsplus

Where the a corresponds to the first disk, b second disk, etc.
The X is the partition number.

If my own system is representative it should be

mount /dev/hda3 /mnt -t hfsplus

It's the 3rd partition in the table below in this out of the box Mac OS X set-up.

Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/rdisk0'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map Apple 63 @ 1
2: Apple_Free 262144 @ 64 (128.0M)
3: Apple_HFS Untitled 312319590 @ 262208 (148.9G)
4: Apple_Free 10 @ 312581798

Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=312581808 (149.1G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
 
Ah - this might be another (easier?) option (found the link here):
[broken link removed] - A free Java-based utility to read HFS Plus on Windows
Click to expand...
Alternatively might contain some useful links.
 
Yes, give Clubman's HFSExplorer link a try first :)

GUIs are nicer (when they work) and hopefully you won't have to mess with another UNIX OS just to mount the filesystem.
 
Thanks guys,don't know where you find this stuff as google did nothing for me when I tried...I'll give it a go and see what happens!
 
Unlike many other queries on AAM, in this case it may not have been so obvious. For example I had an idea that the Mac nowadays uses some Unix/Linux filesystem but didn't know which. GeneralZod mentioned HFS+ so I did another search with that info and came up with HFSExplorer. Let us know how you get on. Hopefully it works.
 
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