Many of us are not that much technical to troubleshoot the critical Mac issues and sometimes this may happen with techies that they got feeling that installing new Mac OS is much more easier than troubleshooting. Tech gurus always suggested to take proper backup of hard drive or at least backup the data to minimize the loss. But what if Mac refuses to boot? You can reinstall the OS X but you can not save data loss, right?
If you are thinking so then, wait fact is you can create backup. Yes, even if Mac fails to boot. What you all need is one working external drive such as external USB formatted in Mac readable file system. Make sure this external drive is in working condition & Mac verified. Make sure these tips is going to work only when your Mac is not booting due to software trouble.
Boot System in TDM: Using Target disk Mode, user can target any of the drive to boot the Mac. For this, boot the Mac while holding “T” key until the firwire symbol appears on your Mac. Connect one end of the fireWire with your Mac and Connect second Mac on the other end of the firewire. This second Mac can be used for backup purpose but if it is desirable to take backup in external hard drive then connect external hard drive with second Mac.
What is happening now is that we are going to boot Mac using another Mac connected through the firewire with our Mac. In this case this second Mac will work as external boot drive for our Mac. We can access all the files folder of present in our Mac and can perform any operation on them as our system is working as external hard drive for second system. Now it is not hard to take backup of our Mac. You can also put this backup in external drive connected with second Mac .
Making sure that everything is fine in backup you can go for wipe the hard disk of your Mac. You can use disk utility or any third party tool such as Stellar Wipe for wiping the hard drive. Wipe will make your drive as new just reinstall Mac OS X and your Mac is ready to use!
This is an ideal case when other Mac or external hard drive is working well. As the matter of fact, “everything every time is not go smooth” Just imagine, Your Mac fails to mount to the other Mac even after connecting it through firewire. There may be wirefire issue or may be file system error occurred. Then there is no way out, none but Mac data recovery software can save you form data loss. You can use target disk mode but you can not access the data in that case. To access data in that case you need to verify the disk permissions. Disk utility or any third party tool can help you in this. Using disk utility check “verify“ to verify the file system of the drive and then “repair” if any problem found if problem persist you need to follow all the steps in what if drive disappears from your Mac
