My OS partition dissapeared **poof**

Stilgar1973

Registered
Please don't rag on me for doing something stupid. I know it was dumb, I think I have figured out the correct answer. Because of me pictures of my father-in-laws deceased wife are in danger of being unrecoverable, I feel bad enough.

Please give me some help.

Okay. Bottom line, I am a PC guy invading my Father-in-laws Mac universe. I know a great deal about PC's, I have a cert under my belt and am working on my CCNA. Generally I am not a stupid person.

I know nothing about Macs or OSX or Unix or Linux.
I am willing to learn.
(in fact I would like my next class after my CCNA classes to be focused on OSX)

My Dad in law bought an imac. It will be arriving on Monday. It is replacing a 4 year old emac.

He tasked me with figuring out how to transfer files from his old mac to his new mac.
While at the local mac store I talked to the guy selling us the imac and he suggested that software that transfers files between an old comp and a new comp may not be trustworthy because of how new 10.5 is. He suggested that making a backup and transfering the files from the backup to the new comp may be the way to go.
I asked if he could do it and he was like, 'ummm sure. First hour costs $100'.
I got the point.

Now I had tried to network the emac with my PC in the past and had nothing but trouble. In fact, I was never successful with it. When I had tried it in the past it went so badly that this time I didn't even try that route.

I had installed a DVDRW on his emac recently. But when I tried to write to it for the backup I couldn't get it to write. I got frustrated and confused over wether the problem was some weird permissions thing or if it was missing drivers for burning.

There is only 1 partition on that disc (mistake number 1) and it is called something like MAC0S. I made it when I installed 10.4 in the spring.
So I was stuck.
I only had 1 partition to work with, I couldn't network out and I couldn't burn.
The correct answer was: to go into disk manager via the 10.4 disk and create a new partition out of the free space and do a backup to that.
But I was frustrated and that thought never occured to me.

Instead I did the dumbest thing imaginable.
I did the backup of the entire machine to the desktop.

So... I let it run overnight.
The next day I checked it out and discovered that it had rebooted and come up with an OS9 style folder with a question mark in the middle of it.
Didn't take me long to learn what had happened.

The MACOS parition had dissapeared and a different parition (what I would discover isn't a proper partition) called OS2 had taken its place.

Thats all I got. That is where I am at.

On Saturday I am removing that drive from the emac and putting it in a USB enclosure. When he gets his imac I am going to use some sort of drive recovery software on it.
That is the only idea I have.

Here is the key: I don't need the OS back. He is getting an Imac on Monday. The emac is toast anyways.
I just need to get at the information on that disc so I can put it on the new imac.

Any suggestions or advice or software recommendations would be most helpful.
 
http://www.prosofteng.com

This company (Prosoft) makes recovery software for OSX. I use it myself (although never for what you describe). It's not free (or even cheap) but it might do the job without creating more problems. It should recover the recoverable files onto a Firewire drive. (I'm not certain about your USB enclosure but I think the iMac will handle it OK).
 
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