Recovering photos from an iMac that will not boot
Remove the disk and read it on another Mac.
- Answers
- How do you recover photos from an iMac that will not boot?
- Topics
- apple · data · photo · repair
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2020-10-15_rescuing-photos-from-a-crashed-imac/
Summary
A dead iMac rarely means dead data. I removed the glass panel with suction cups, unscrewed the Torx screws behind it, took out the hard disk and read it on another Mac through a SATA-to-USB converter.
Full text
The iMac would not start and Apple's standard software recovery did not work either, which pointed at a hardware failure. The display is the only way in: the glass panel is held to the aluminium frame by strong magnets and comes off with suction caps, and Torx screws then release the display itself. Lift it carefully, cables run to the logic board. I removed only the hard disk, closed the iMac again, and connected the disk to a borrowed Mac through a standard SATA-to-USB converter chip. Using another Mac matters, because the operating system then understands the file system on the salvaged disk. Copy the most important files first instead of browsing around, a damaged disk can die any second. I went straight for the original files in the photo library and rescued about twenty years of photos, losing only one month to bad sectors.