Need help reading very old Apple drive on pc

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Rikkitic

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#293099 28-Dec-2021 13:26

I need to get data off a very old Apple laptop IDE hard drive. I have been reading similar drives from Windows computers without problem, but the Apple drive is unreadable. I don’t think it is damaged and I suspect the problem has to do with the age of the drive. It would have been running a very old version of the Apple OS and it is even possible that the CPU was one of the pre-Intel ones. It is a 30 GB drive and the label on it says Apple firmware 2001 and it is dated October 2002.

The laptop it came out of was non-functional and is no longer in my possession. Is there any way to see what is on the drive using a Windows or Linux-based set-up? I am connecting the drives directly to the motherboard on a pc running XP, but I guess I could boot it from a Linux CD if that would make a difference. Can anyone help with this?

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

roobarb

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#2839527 28-Dec-2021 14:03

I would recommend taking a "dd" copy of the entire drive and then put the drive away and keep it safe, then only work with copies of the disk. The dd image will confirm if the drive itself is actually readable. If it came from an old Apple Laptop it suggests it will likely be an HFS or HFS+ format disk. It might be worth taking the low-level image, writing it to a USB stick and then seeing if a modern Mac can understand it.

wazzageek

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#2839536 28-Dec-2021 14:30

Hopefully it's an HFS / HFS+ formatted drive - you should be able to get HFS(+) drivers through the linux kernel (YMMV depending on the distro you happen to be using).

On Windows, you may have luck with "HFSExplorer" - this is free, but requires a Java environment. I recall this tool from a while back, and think I've used it to browse the "Mac" side of earlier Mac / Win hybrid CD's.

Behodar

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#2839619 28-Dec-2021 16:51

2002 will almost certainly be HFS+ unless you manually formatted it to something else (UFS was an option for a while but very few people needed it). I agree with the advice to take a dd copy of the drive; if you have access to a modern Mac then simply double-clicking the resulting image should be sufficient to access the files.