recover a mac hard drive in VM?

[niietzshe]

Hey all,

I just powered up my first PC build last night that's my dedicated UnRaid server, all going well! It's going to be a few weeks of me just getting all my data ready to transfer over, so no disks in there yet though.

 

I do think I might have a use for it in the mean time however. I have an old mac drive (from PowerPC days) that I'd like to recover some sentimental photo's from. Has anyone tried doing this through a VM and running a disk recover tool on them? Any suggestions?

 

Thanks

C

 

P.s. By VM I don't necessarily mean a mac VM, either a Linux or Windows build that'll handle it (preferably Linux).

[PCRx]

Last week I came across a Windows XP hard drive backup image made 6 years ago with DD. I no longer have the drive but thought it'd be fun to get it the image to boot as a virtual disk. This was in Windows not Mac, but i'd think the process might be similar.

 

First make a DD img of your drive.

Use raw2vmdk on the img file to create the virtual disk headers. It's a cross-platform JAVA app.  https://github.com/Zapotek/raw2vmdk

Create your VM to closely match the original machine.

Remove the VM's hard disk and attach your vmdk to the VM and boot.

 

In my case it wouldn't boot. A simple replacement of the MBR record and it works fine.

If you don't need it to boot up just install a bootable OS in your VM then add your VMDK as a second drive. You should be able to use recovery tools on it.