Did you know that you can use Knoppix to back-up a Mac?
As some of you know, the CD-ROM on the Mac I use no longer works. So I brought it to the Apple store to have a look at. After the guys behind the counter ran some diagnostics, it turns out that it is indeed a hardware problem. However, in order to get the CD-ROM fixed I need to backup the drive and send it to AppleCare. I should have it back in a day or so. I'm thinking, no problem. I'll just boot with my Mac System Rescue CD and image the drive to an external FireWire drive, right? Nope. Remember, it's the CD-ROM that's broken, which eliminates booting from the CD-ROM as an option.
So, what to do? Turns out that the Macs have some very cool boot tricks that remind me of Sun. On trick is to power off the Mac and then press and hold the "T" key while you turn the Mac back on. By pressing the "T" key the Mac does not boot into OS X, but rather turns itself into a FireWire drive. So, I plugged one end of a FireWire cable into the Mac and the other end of the cable into my Knoppix Linux box and sure enough, dmesg showed a new drive at /dev/ sda. Unfortunately, I could not mount the drive (tried a few mount options without success). But I was able to image the drive using 'dd if=/dev/sda of=mac.img'
At this point I have a complete image of my Mac's hard drive. The gutsy thing to do now is to intentionally wipe the Mac's disk clean, e.g dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, try to boot the Mac (hopefully fail), and then restore the image (dd if=mac.img of=/dev/sda), and try to boot again (hopefully success). But I haven't gotten around to doing that, yet
In summary, to image a Mac drive you'll need an x86 machine with a FireWire card, a FireWire cable, a hard drive large enough to hold the Mac's image, and Knoppix. Boot the x86 machine with Knoppix. Boot the Mac while holding down the "T" key. Plug the FireWire cable first into the x86 and then into the Mac. Begin imaging Mac drive.
Enjoy. Regards, - Robert http://www.cwelug.org/downloads Help others get OpenSource software. Distribute FLOSS for Windows, Linux, *BSD, and MacOS X with BitTorrent _______________________________________________ CWE-LUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.cwelug.org/ http://www.cwelug.org/archives/ http://www.cwelug.org/mailinglist/
