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Rescue Files from Dead Macs

Last month, my 3 year old Mac finally kicked the bucket. The Starting Mac OS X screen would appear and the progress bar would reach the end, but the computer would not go any further. 2 months before I had first become aware of the hard drive problem, and backed up all the important stuff onto CD-RWs, but of course after it died I thought of some more stuff I needed. So here’s a quick way of getting your files off.

Stuff You Need:

• Another computer (PC or Mac)
• A network that both computers can be connected to

Now, let’s get started!

1. First, make sure the computer is connected to your network.
2. Start it up, while holding Cmd+S.
3. You should reach a command line. Type the following (it will start an SSH server, which we will use to retrieve the files).

   /usr/sbin/sshd

4. One more step to get it ready: The computer is not fully started up yet, so the ethernet interface is not yet available (if you type ifconfig, the only interface listed is loopback). Type

   sh /etc/rc

5. It will now proceed with the startup process. Once you get an error line (mine was some disk read errors followed by “coreservicesd crashed”), you can now try to retrieve your files.
6. The SFTP  (SSH FTP) program used in this tutorial is FileZilla, although any such program will work. Download and launch it.
7. Choose Site Manager from the File menu.
8. Click New Site.
9. Settings:

   Host: your Mac’s IP address (check your router manual, for a Linksys router it is 192.168.1.1xx)

   Server type: SFTP

   Logon type: Normal

   User: your username

   Password: your password

10. Click Connect.
11. If all goes well, you can now access your files as on an FTP server.

Hope this helps!