• Registered: 2010-03-21
  • Posts: 54

Topic: Statler A2 as a MacBook data recovery disk

My wife's core duo MBP was stuck in eternal boot and 8g of photo plus 30g of audio files were trapped on it.  The time machine archive was corrupted the day previous and the building of the new archive seemed to contribute to the current frozen state. 

The os 10 disk  disk repair utility did not fix the file system,
fsck -fy form a safe boot did not fix it either and the system still refused to boot.

The next step was trying to use a rescue cd to extract the data from the hfs+ drive.

I could not get knoppix 6.2 or riplinux to boot from the cd drive, however my statler A2 live cd did boot and it could mount the hfs+ partition on the uncoopoerative MBP.   

# mount -t hfsplus ... ...

At that point it took about 40 minutes to recover 40g of data to an external usb drive.
After an hour and a half of installs, upgrades  and file transfers I have a current Statler running on another laptop with all of the transplanted media recognized my banshee and shotwell.   

I  was baffled by how well the media library meta-data was preserved and how simple the import/recovery process from iphoto and itunes was.  No more vendor lock-in.

Another suprise was that I could boot and recover from a debian live-cd (Statler A2) but not rescue/recovery distos, knoppix and RIPlinux.

So far, so good as my spouse is happy with her new #! system.

Cheers

brokenpike

  • From: Lincoln, UK
  • Registered: 2008-11-20
  • Posts: 4,426

Re: Statler A2 as a MacBook data recovery disk

^ cool story, thank you for sharing. smile

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corenominal's Website

  • fox
  • #! Junkie
  • Offline
  • From: Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
  • Registered: 2009-05-10
  • Posts: 361

Re: Statler A2 as a MacBook data recovery disk

I wonder if the difference in boot disks was due to the age of the kernel?  I think that the kernel on knoppix is older than the 2.6.32 on Statler.  At any rate, thanks for sharing your experience.  I'm a Mac user too, and one never knows when a rescue is necessary.

Mac user with Linux tendencies
#!CrunchBang Statler & UNE 10.10 on Acer 1810TZ (OCZ Vertex 60gb SSD)
#!, Mint LMDE & Peppermint Ice on MSI Wind U100 (Gigabye Atheros b/g wireless)
Various linux virtual machines on a Mac mini, an iMac and a MacBook Pro