Episode: 2929
Title: HPR2929: Recovering Files from a Dead MacBook Air
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2929/hpr2929.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:26:47

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It's the 24th of October 2019. It's HPR episode 2929, recovering falls from a dead MacBook
air. It's hosted by John Culp. It's about 8 minutes long carries a clean flag.
Summary is, I talk about recovering the falls from my wife's dead MacBook air,
using a new Ubuntu live CD.
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Hey everybody, this is John Culp in Lafayette, Louisiana, and I've got a quicky episode today
about something that I did yesterday that made me a household hero, and so maybe this will help
somebody out there who finds him or herself in a similar situation, and y'all can be heroes also.
So what happened was my wife has a MacBook air. She inherited from her mother when she passed away
several years ago, and it had been working fine for a while, and now she uses it every day,
all of that, and suddenly it just went dead. It would start to boot up. You'd see the
little Apple icon, and then after about two seconds it would just shut down and would not boot up.
I don't think it seemed like it might have had problems charging as well, but I don't remember that
in particular. So anyway, she wasn't super concerned about it because her work had just
like her employer had just purchased a computer that she could use for work, and so that was okay,
but she did want to get her files off of it, and that's where I came, and I said,
why don't you let me see what I can do, because I was pretty sure that if the hard drive in the
MacBook Air was at all salvageable, that I could probably get stuff off it using a Linux live CD,
and so I brought home my, at my office, I always keep a copy of the latest long-term support release
of Ubuntu, and so I brought that home, plugged in a USB optical drive to her MacBook Air,
because of course it doesn't have an optical drive, and I did not have a copy of this on
flash drive. So I booted from it, and it first, it booted fine into the live CD environment,
so that was encouraging because it meant that the hardware, at least in part, was still working fine,
but I was not able to mount the hard drive from inside the live session, it kept saying that there
was some kind of error, it didn't get very specific about it, it said it could be any one of the
following errors, and just based on the way her computer had behaved, I thought it was
probable that there was some kind of damage to the hard drive, or it needed some kind of repair,
so I decided to try and just reboot and see if it would boot normally after having kind of
shaken itself and gotten into a live session, that didn't work, it still wouldn't boot into its normal
OS, so I booted into another live CD session, and then started googling how to make the hard drive
mount even when it was damaged, and I came across a very helpful blog post, and I will put a link
to it in the show notes, it's called Repair Slash Fix Mac HFS Plus Partition Using Ubuntu,
and it lists the requirements you need, internet connection Ubuntu live CD, and then it shows the
data recovery process, and so I already had the live CD, and I was able to get an internet connection
while in the live CD session, and so the only part of this that I really needed, I think, was
the part where he has you install one package while in the live CD session, it's called HFS
Progs, HFS PROGS, this is a crucial part because I guess FDisk needs this package in order to work
on an HFS Plus Partition, so once you're in the live CD session, you do pseudo apt-get install HFS
Progs, and once that's done, you can do the FDisk command with the L flag to list the available
devices, figure out which partition the Mac is on, and on mine it was slash dev slash SDA2,
and so then he gives you the command to run to check that partition, and so I ran it,
pseudo space FSCK, sorry, pseudo space FSCK, so I guess that's file system check.hfs plus
space slash dev slash SDA2, and it just so happened that the command that he gives as an example was
the exact one I needed because the partition was the same on his machine as on my wife,
and so it takes a few minutes, it checks the HFS Plus Partition for errors and then tries to fix them,
and after about four or five minutes it exited saying that it was successfully repaired,
and sure enough when I went into the Ubuntu GUI file manager and clicked on the hard drive on,
that left browser column on the left hand side of the file manager, it mounted the drive,
whereas it wouldn't do that before, now it would not let me get in and
fool around with my wife's files because I said I didn't have permission, and so clearly you need
to escalate permissions in order to do that, and so what I did was went to a terminal and got
myself into the root user, you can do that on in a live session just by doing pseudo space SU,
and it will give you a root prompt, and then just used command line copy commands to copy it onto
an external USB drive, so I got her entire user file, like user directory, off of the mac onto an
external hard drive, and saved her files in that way, I did then try to just reboot into the macOS,
thinking well maybe now that the hard drive is repaired, it will boot, but it didn't, it still
wouldn't boot into the macOS, and so she was happy enough just to get her files back because she had
all kinds of work in there, and then of course recipes that we all like in the house, and that we would
hate to have to try to track down again and stuff like that, so anyway, needless to say, I was a
household hero for saving all of her files, and then she said I could do whatever I wanted with the
macbook air, and so I installed Ubuntu on it, and it seems to work pretty well, it did not have
any errors in the installation, and it boots up just fine into the Linux operating system,
now it probably would have been fine just to reinstall macOS X on there as well, but I didn't have
any installation media so I couldn't do it, it seems like there's a little bit of issue when you
suspend it and wake it back up, that it doesn't reconnect to the Wi-Fi necessarily, and you can have
trouble getting the Wi-Fi to work again after suspending, but at any rate it's kind of nice to
get some more useful life out of that laptop, okay that's it, I don't think I have anything more to
say about that except for three years for the Linux live CD phenomenon which allows you to get in
there and get files off dead things, so hope that is helpful to some of you out there, and I will talk
to you all later, okay, bye-bye.
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