So, what can you do when your Apple Macbook Pro dies and it takes with it your only copy of important files? Well like this unfortunate owner you would probably contact your local Apple Mac computer retailer. Hopefully you won’t get the response this customer got … “Oh, I’m afraid that’s legacy equipment now, not worth the repair, you would do better to find an independent to see if they can recover the data for you”.

Well, I have dealt with a few Macs so offered to see what could be done. With a little help from Linux and HSFExplorer a Windows PC was able to save the day. The Mac Pro disk seemed ok but at first would not register. This is were some knowledge of Linux and a Linux PC, in my case running Ubunto can help. This would at least show the disk contents even though I could not recover the files due to ownership and permission difficulties. A knowledge of using the Linux command terminal with the chown and chmod commands helped a bit but still did not complete the job.

To get the files to copy to an external drive I needed to mount the Mac drive as a writable drive. Using HFSExplorer on Windows 10 did the trick allowing a 180GB of previously unavailable documents, photos and media to be recovered to an external drive.

The result? --- One mega happy customer!

If you are having issues with MACs or any computers or software contact me here: Contact Tony. It’s quite rare that nothing can done and advice is free!