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My mac recently gave up and I'm trying to salvage whatever data I can from the hard drive. I was able to boot using the OSX Installation CD and fire up Disk Utility that basically told me that the drive could not be repaired and I need to format it. My question - how can I manually mount it (from Terminal) and try to recover some of my data? I figured that if Disk Utility can see it, perhaps I could too. Thanks.

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sa125
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2 Answers2

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To mount disks:

diskutil list

see your drive and note id#, then:

diskutil mountDisk /dev/diskn

where n is the # you id'ed in diskutil list

Moda
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You can try something like this:

mount /dev/disk1s10

And replace disk1s10 with the identifier of your drive.

JW8
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  • There are plenty of disk* entries in `/dev`. How can I know which one is my actual drive? thanks again. – sa125 Nov 07 '11 at 18:20
  • There are a few ways that I can think of. First get a list of all mounted drives before mounting the old drive. After you mount the old drive, view the list again - you can id it by process of elimination. There were a few other methods found in this SU post: http://superuser.com/questions/114515/how-can-i-find-what-dev-my-dvd-drive-is `drutil` and `df` looked like the most effective methods – JW8 Nov 07 '11 at 18:53
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    you can know the identifier doing `diskutil list disk2` (i.e for disk2) – konus Nov 26 '11 at 04:29