Had a friend bring me his poor little Intel Mac Mini. It was making a horrible knocking noise that almost certainly indicated a dying hard drive. It wouldn’t boot up anymore. It just sat at the blue startup screen and hung there.

Trouble is that he had all of his purchased iTunes Music on that little knocking hard drive and had no backup. He didn’t have a iPod so that we could not just import the music back from the MP3 player, so we actually had to recover the data.

I used Target Disk mode to get his music back. It is a feature on every Mac that allows a Mac to boot up as a very expensive hard drive enclosure attached to another Mac with a Firewire cable connected between them.


You can tell a Mac to boot up in Target Disk mode by either going to the Startup Control Panel and clicking Target Disk mode or by simply holding the T button down on a Mac as it boots up. If you have a screen attached to it, the Mac will display a giant firewire symbol indicating that it is in Target Disk Mode. The internal hard drive(s) should show up on the desktop of the booted computer, although severely damaged drives may not.

We got lucky in this case, the iTunes Music library was not stored on the damaged part of the hard drive, so we were able to copy the whole folder (Home folder/Music/iTunes Library.) In fact, we were able to to copy the entire Users directory so that all of his data was safe.

As a note, once a Mac is in Target Disk Mode, you can run Disk Utility or any other disk repair software from the booted computer. When you are finished, just hit the power button to turn off the computer and then turn it on again to start the computer up normally.

Hopefully, my friend will backup his music next time!

[tags]iPod,MP3 Player, MacOSX, iTunes[/tags]

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