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Boot from USB to clone an unbootable drive?

My 2015 Macbook Pro has died - I think it's a logic board failure and I want to try to recover the data from the drive. Unfortunately it is a 16+6 proprietary fitting (SSD) and the cheapest external enclosure for it is slightly more than I want to pay.


My son has a 2014 MBP with the same SSD fitting but obviously his machine won't boot from my SSD (I tried it!)


What I'm wondering is, if I made a bootable USB drive, would I be able to put my SSD in his machine, boot from the external drive and then save my data?


Thanks


MacBook Pro, OS X 10.11

Posted on Aug 31, 2023 4:23 AM

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Posted on Aug 31, 2023 8:07 AM

Consider accessing the non-working Mac's drive using Target Disk Mode. This allows the drive to appear on another Mac as if it were locally connected.


The software to support target disk mode is in the wounded Mac's ROM, and does not need to boot up MacOS to be usable as such a drive.


Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode - Apple Support


I do not recommend cloning the drive, because around 40 GB of stuff on that drive is MacOS itself, which is NOT self-modifying, and can be re-installed in an EXACT replica in a few hours.




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3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 31, 2023 8:07 AM in response to gavspav

Consider accessing the non-working Mac's drive using Target Disk Mode. This allows the drive to appear on another Mac as if it were locally connected.


The software to support target disk mode is in the wounded Mac's ROM, and does not need to boot up MacOS to be usable as such a drive.


Transfer files between two Mac computers using target disk mode - Apple Support


I do not recommend cloning the drive, because around 40 GB of stuff on that drive is MacOS itself, which is NOT self-modifying, and can be re-installed in an EXACT replica in a few hours.




Sep 1, 2023 8:07 PM in response to gavspav

gavspav wrote:

My 2015 Macbook Pro has died - I think it's a logic board failure and I want to try to recover the data from the drive. Unfortunately it is a 16+6 proprietary fitting (SSD) and the cheapest external enclosure for it is slightly more than I want to pay.

My son has a 2014 MBP with the same SSD fitting but obviously his machine won't boot from my SSD (I tried it!)

macOS is very particular in which SSD is used in each Mac. Even though the SSD is physical & electronically compatible, macOS knows there is a difference and refuses to work. The funny thing is a non-Apple OS like Linux will work perfectly fine with the SSD installed in the different Mac...I personally tried it on an SSD which macOS refused to boot.


What I'm wondering is, if I made a bootable USB drive, would I be able to put my SSD in his machine, boot from the external drive and then save my data?

Maybe. But from my own personal experience when I encountered the issue of "incompatible" SSD, macOS would refuse to boot even from the installer when the incorrect SSD was installed internally. With another somewhat incompatible SSD, macOS would sort of work enough to do what you want.


Unfortunately OWC is one of the very few vendors who make an enclosure for the Apple OEM blade SSDs. Sometimes OWC may have a used or Open Box item available for a bit less than a new one.


In the future make sure to always have frequent and regular backups of your computer and all external media (including the cloud) which contains important & unique data. With the 2016+ USB-C Macs, there are a lot more ways of permanently losing access to your data even without a hardware failure. Plus if the SSD had failed, then it would be extremely difficult or even impossible to recover any data...it would definitely be more expensive than the cost of an external USB3 backup drive. macOS includes the Time Machine backup software for free, you just need to supply an external drive.

Boot from USB to clone an unbootable drive?

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