My wife’s ibook won’t boot into the GUI, and I’ve narrowed it down to disk I/O errors. The problem now is that my wife has zero backups of her data, so I’m trying to save the data somehow.
I can boot into Single User mode, and I have a 512 MB USB thumb drive. But there is no /dev/usb to mount. Does anyone know how to mount a USB drive?
Alternatively, does anyone have any other suggestions of how to get the data off the hard drive without paying someone?
Take the hard drive out, and for like $20, get a laptop hard drive enclosure. Then, you can hook the hard drive up to any computer and transfer all the data to that other computer.
That sounds like a good idea. Do you know of some good software to read HFS from Windows XP? I don’t have a linux machine at the moment.
don’t know any, sorry. Don’t you have another mac you can put them on?
Nope, one is more than enough. 
uhm get a LIVE linux iso, and load it, and then you should be able to read your hard drive and all.
The hard drive enclosure method is abit rough, but will work, also you could get an IDE to 2.5" HDD adapter and use that.
The other method is to try mount the USB disk using :
mount /dev/usb /tmp
(assuming you have a /tmp and stuff.)
or go into /etc/fstab look how other stuff is mounted add a line for your USB stick and issue mount -a once that is done.
all the above commands work for linux… But i’m not sure they will work on Mac. PM me if your havign trouble and i’ll do my best to help you.
If there’s another Mac around, what you can try is Command-T which will boot it as a firewire hard drive. Plug the firewire into another computer, and the mac should show up as an external drive. Whether windows will read it or not I dunno, but a linux live cd (I recommend Ubuntu) should do it.
I tried that in the Single User mode for OS X, but I’m not sure what the actual name is of the usb port. (There is no /dev/usb).
I’m considering trying the hard drive enclosure method, but I have to acquire the tool to unscrew the ibook case.
My concern with using a linux live CD is that my Windows hard drive is in NTFS, so I would have to read from HFS and write to NTFS. Is reliable NTFS support built into any linux live CD yet? I think I’d rather take my chances with finding a Windows App to read HFS directly.
Is the USB key formatted as NTFS or Fat32 (aka “vfat”)? If it’s fat32 (or fat16 for that matter, you can use the Live CD to boot up, and then write to the USB key.
yeah wot you say is true evil nick, but since i’m guessing hes using this usb stick with his mac it wont be NTFS.
in fact wot do macs use as their filesystem is it reiserfs or ext3 or sommit?
try looking into /var/messages/log and see what comes up when you plug the drive in. Again this is true for linux i dont really know if there is a /var/messages/log file in mac os
Macs use… HPFS I think? They don’t use either resier or ext2/3… It’s proprietary, whatever it is. No /var/messages either… I believe the command:
sudo dmesg
Will work… I hate not having a root password…