I have a late 2014 15.6" Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt 2, on which I accidentally wiped the entire partition table, including Recovery HD (yeah, I was stupid). There's some data on it that I kind of want (nothing super important though). I haven't had any luck recovering the data with freely available tools (I tried a few things on Linux live USBs, and I also tried the Disk Drill MacOS USB, which saw nothing), so I was trying to demo the R-Studio data recovery software to see if it could find the lost partitions and files. However, the USB wouldn't boot on the old laptop, and the tech support guy at R-Studio said the only way I could do it was to run R-Studio on another Mac and read the drive using Target Disk Mode.
If I buy a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter and a Thunderbolt 2 cable, would I be able to use Target Disk Mode from my 2017 15" Thunderbolt-3-equipped work laptop? And would this in fact give the level of hardware access needed for lost partition/lost file recovery?
I feel like the data has to still be there in some form, because I haven't written anything to the disk since I borked it up.
Best Answer
Yes, that should work. I recall that working for me with a similar situation in the past.
Here's a couple links that might help.
https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/41010-mac-os-101-how-to-boot-and-use-a-mac-in-target-disk-mode/
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/transfer-files-mac-computers-target-disk-mode-mchlp1443/11.0/mac/11.0