How to access mac hard drive. The only requirement for time machine is to have an attached hard drive to back your files up to. Next select the general tab when the finder preferences window appears on your mac screen. There are two ways to access such external drives on your mac via linux os or fuse system.
A drive formatted in this fashion can be swapped between a mac and windows pc. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail. If you dont have a bootable backup or a way to get a mac drive you will need to boot the computer from another operating system.
First try to boot your mac in recovery mode holding down cmd r on restart. Click the file menu and select load file system from device it will automatically locate the connected drive and you can load it. Shut down the computer you want to use as an external hard disk ie the target computer.
Youll see the contents of the hfs drive in the graphical window. Open your hard drive by double clicking the macbook proair drive icon on your desktop figure 1. Do not delete or rename any of these folders.
The easiest would be installing linux to a secondary drive or virtual machine. Next click on the preferences option. To use hfsexplorer connect your mac formatted drive to your windows pc and launch hfsexplorer.
How to show hard drive icon on mac desktop. Inside the users folder you will find your home folder figure 2. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files.
Click the manage button to open the storage management window pictured below. If you go with linux installation dual boot your mac with linux on another drive and use fat32 as a transfer intermediary. However you might choose instead a format you can use easily with os x windows and linux.
However computers that do not have firewire or thunderbolt ports are excluded. Go to the menu bar and then move to finder. Choose apple menu about this mac then click storage.
You will see several folders on what is called the root of the hard drive. To make a mac act as an external hard disk you can put it in target disk mode and connect it to another mac with a firewire or thunderbolt cable as follows.