disk recovery software for MAC filesystems?

[mcveigh]

I got an email from a friend tonight who's external drive (western digital) on his mac died.
I'm a little confused as he said he used it with Time Machine. I take that to mean these are backups and the original files are elsewhere.
anyways he's frantic to recover them. He says the Mac wont recognize the HD.

If I could get it recognized, are there any Linux tools that would help me recover data. I don't have a Mac, I guess I could use his if need be.
I'm guessing if I could get it mounted in linux I could use "dd" to get data off.
I've never played around with Mac filesystems.

I figure he's pretty much screwed.

 

[Nothinman]

Linux supports at least read-only HFS and HFS+ so as long as the drive spins up you should be able to mount it and copy the data off. If the drive is bad enough that mounting it doesn't work you could use dd_rescue to create an image from it and try mounting that after it completes.

 

[mcveigh]

good info, I hadn't heard of ddrescue before

thanks!

 

[ChAoTiCpInOy]

If it's an actual problem with the drive itself, take the drive out and run Spinrite on it through a Windows computer. If its a file system problem, Techtool Pro and Disk Warrior are some programs that'll work.