I have a mac book pro that is crashing everytime I logged in (with every users). The cause may be that my gf put so many pictures and video on the hard drive that it can't even start (from the restore utility, it has 40mb of free space).
I am looking for a way to recover the data from the hard drive , before I can restore it with a clean setup.
I have done it previously on windows partition by using a live linux distro and copying to an external drive, but the mac book doesn't seem to recognize it. Is there a trick ? Or a way to access the console from the login screen ? Maybe a way to mount and extract data from a recovery image I would create from the recovery partition. I am at lost here,
Thank you in advance for your advices
Best Answer
Your response indicates that you can boot into the recovery partition so I am making that assumption for this answer.
If you can boot into the recovery partition (accomplished by holding down Command+R while your computer is booting), there are a couple things that may work. Either using Disk Utility to create a disk image (easy but time-consuming) or using the terminal to transfer files (hard if you're not comfortable with the command line but more likely to work).
To create a disk image:
If that fails, you can use Terminal to transfer files from the recovery partition by following these steps:
I can add more info on using the Finder to copy files if you need it but this is a useful primer.