Recovering From MacBook Pro Hard Drive Failure

01 Mar 2013

My computer kept freezing when I was using the Chrome browser. Just recently Chrome was updated to a new version, so I thought the new version was buggy. Turns out the new version of Chrome wasn’t buggy, my hard drive was dying. Recently it made an unhappy noise after I moved it while in bed. I should have known then, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. If I was more vigilant in my backups I would not have to recover the hard drive. I’ve been pretty busy with the Insight Data Science Fellowship that I neglected my backups. It seems like OSX wants to finish writing the journal entry to the hard drive, but when it does that it encounters an error. I know windows is F8 during boot, but I had to look up the startup key combinations for the mac. Command-v | Verbose Mode
—|—
C | Start up from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive
I popped in my Ubuntu CD and copied my user directory to a Windows network share. Create Mount Point ` $ sudo mkdir /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Mount Share Drive $ sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //LOCALHOST/SHARE_NAME /mnt/MOUNT_POINT Tar user directory $ sudo bash $ cd /media/Machintosh HD/Users $ tar cvf /mnt/MOUNT_POINT/username.tar username` Directories to backup ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook ~/Library/Application Support/Adium ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0 ~/Library/Calendars ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist ~/Library/Mail ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/