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And despite some incredibly cool new features as well as an overall speediness on my quad-core Mac Pro, I came across a new disk utility mode wherein the operating system can take a hard drive that's otherwise inaccessible to other OS X operating systems and utilities (including Mac OS X 10.4.10, DiskWarrior and Data Rescue II) and was able to mount and work with the disk in a limited capacity.
This came in handy recently when a client handed off a hard drive from her iBook G4 that was, for all intents and purposes, pretty much croaked. Target Disk mode wouldn't mount it, Mac OS X 10.4.10 somewhat saw it but never brought it to the desktop and other utilities only noticed it as a distant volume; nothing that could really be read from and written to.
Short of a miracle, nothing was getting her documents, resume, music, pictures and life's data back.
Flipping over to the Leopard partition, I loaded the drive into an external USB 2.0 hard drive carrier, plugged the device into my Mac Pro and hoped for the best. Mac OS X 10.5, which quickly flashed a dialog box mentioning a utility mode stating it would work with the drive in a limited capacity, brought the drive to the desktop and mounted it where nothing else had been able to do so before.
From there, I nursed the files off to a reliable partition, sometimes one folder or one folder at a time until at least the Users folder had been preserved for transplant. Where every utility I had thrown at the problem had failed, a beta build of the upcoming Mac OS had succeeded and helped save my client's data without having to send it to a recovery service.
6:10 PM
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