I'm trying to retrieve data from an old MacBook.
I've removed the hard drive, put it into an external enclosure, and connected it to my current MacBook.
This is the structure of the drive in Disk Utility:
I'm trying to access Macintosh HD, but when I turn the hard drive on only Recovery HD mounts. (Although I'm not able to eject it.)
I've tried mounting it manually and running First Aid.
Disk Utility sees how big the drive is, and how much of it is used, which gives me some confidence, but other than that I'm stumped.
Best Answer
One thing to look for is macOS wants to decide if a disk is OK before mounting it. Look for a
fsckprocess in Activity Monitor - be sure you show all processes.If that is running, Disk Utility and Finder won’t do anything, so you may need to wait until that finished (hours or more in some cases) to be presented with the data in read-only mode or read-write mode.
If you just care about reading the data, use a tool that interrupts this mount and just lets you see the disk in read only mode.
The free demo of Data Rescue by Prosoft Engineering is the perfect tool for this job - no need to pay for it unless you decide it has failed and that tool will get you the files back pronto.
I have no ties with Prosoft - just every time I’ve spend money with them, the value has been amazing. You could also choose a good vendor like Drive Savers and just send them the drive for a free quote if you see IO errors in the console log while the filesystem check is running or you hear sounds it’s failing.