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Old June 29th 18, 03:47 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 10,881
Default Reading Apple Files with a Windows Machine?

Boris wrote:

My daughter called me about this yesterday.

She has a 2009-2010 iMac running Snow Leopard. Well, it was running, but
about five years ago, the thing would not fire up, nothing, no sound of a
spinning hard drive, no video on monitor, nothing. It was like it was
not plugged in. She took it to the Apple geniuses, who told her her the
motherboard must be dead, so she put it on the shelf circa 2013. It was
out of warranty.

She now wants to get some files, mostly pics/videos, from the hard drive.

With the help of google, she managed to remove the hard drive. It's a
2.5" 500GB Seagate SATA. She connected it to my adapter/converter cable,
similar to this one

https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Adapt...erter-Optical-
External/dp/B002OV1VJW

and to her Win10 HP laptop. The drive spun up, but nothing popped up on
her screen. According to this article:

https://www.howtogeek.com/252111/how...ed-drive-on-a-
windows-pc/

she was expecting to get something like do you want to format this drive?

She also tried connecting to a Win7 machine, but no luck there, either.

She has not yet installed HFS+/HFSExplorer. She is going to wait until I
can help (tomorrow). But, if we are able to access the Apple hard drive,
can we move files to a Windows PC, and also open them?

Thanks.


Does her current computer have a spare SATA port on the mobo, or a
data-only drive attached that can be temporarily disconnected and used
with the Mac drive? Instead of using USB which requires Windows to be
loaded so afterward the USB devices can be detected and mounted, just
connect the SATA MAC drive to a SATA port on the Windows computer. Does
the current computer have an eSATA port?

When the computer boots, and BEFORE any operating system loads, the POST
screen should show what devices are detected, like the mass storage
devices (hard disks) on the SATA ports, optical drives, etc. At that
point in the POST, no OS is loaded yet so it doesn't matter how the
drive was partitioned or those partitions formatted. The idea is to see
if the bare drive regardless of what has been recorded on it can be
recognized by the computer. If detected, it should in the POST screen.
If not detected, the OS won't find it, either.

Check the computer can find the hardware interface to the migrated
drive. If the computer's BIOS/UEFI doesn't list the SATA hard disk in
its POST screen, the OS won't see it, too. The hardware has to be
working before the OS can find any logical structures recorded on the
drive.

Using USB means the drive cannot be found by the hardware until after
the OS loads and the USB driver(s) get loaded. That just compounds
determining if the migrated drive's basic hardware is even usable.
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