I have a neighbor whose 2010 iMac isn't booting. Of course she has no recent backup. She asked if I'd help her get her pictures off - the whole year from the preschool she runs. (She taught my kids once upon a time; she takes a ton of pics.) She says she installed El Capitan in Feb, and she has none of the original disks or any other media. I have no Apple tools on hand. Ground zero.

From what I've seen, it doesn't look like a very user-friendly case to open. I'd like to hold off on trying to yank the drive for now!

The Apple store said the drive isn't failing (I'll double-check; love my spinrite!), but just has corrupted OS files, and they'll wipe and reinstall the OS but they won't retrieve data first. (Hope it's not a corrupted HFS.)

I can config macs just fine, but I'm not a hard core mac guy. Does anyone know of some solution, perhaps a linux boot cd I can create from a windows machine? (I've seen reference to a mac version of the Ultimate Boot CD. Anyone have experience with it?) I just want to boot it up, mount the non-failing drive, copy the pics and any other obvious data to a usb drive, and give it back to Apple. Then talk her into a proper backup regimen...

Thanks!

-jk

My girlfriend was in this exact situation recently and Tom helped us rescue some data. We didn't get everything, but we got enough. Our main tool was DiskWarrior. Well, and Tom's Mac expertise.

The recovered files didn't all have the original file names, but she was able to sort everything out and find the critical stuff even if it meant sifting through hundreds of files with random numbers for the file names.

When you order DiskWarrior, one of the options is to get the thing mailed to you on a USB stick, so that's one way to get it working even if the system won't boot the hard drive.

I highly recommend getting a USB external disk drive. Having one on hand helped in the recovery process. I seem to recall that we installed the OS onto it and booted from it while we were trying to recover the data from the bad disk that was still in the computer. Once we recovered the data, we removed the bad disk, installed a new fresh/good replacement disk, and then the external drive is now her Time Machine backup drive which hopefully she's using religiously now.

If you have access to another Mac, and a Firewire or Thunderbolt connection between them, this will be useful: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH10725?locale=en_US

DiskWarrior as Tony mentioned is pretty much the goto tool for dealing with HFS corruption that Apple's own Disk Utility won't fix: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

You could run DiskWarrior on the second Mac with the iMac in Target Disk Mode. Or as Tony indicated, booting the iMac off a DiskWarrior USB stick.

As for reinstalling once data is recovered, the 2010 iMac supports Internet recovery, no need for discs: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314 . This process may install an older version of OS X, this will lead you through the steps to get it back to El Capitan: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201475

Once back to full health, definitely get them to use Time Machine to take care of the onsite backups. For offsite, I recommend Backblaze at https://www.backblaze.com

Another approach to offsite if it's mostly their photos they want extra protection for, iCloud Photo Library is a good way to go. This would also sync and merge all their photos between the Mac and any other Apple products such as an iPad. https://www.apple.com/icloud/photos/

Great help! thanks!

While not helpful for your neighbor, I always insist on setting up a Time Machine disk for every Mac I ever help set up. My wife's parents had a ten year old iMac, for example, which crapped out a few months ago. Wouldn't boot. We concluded that it was time for a new one. The new one happily restored itself from the Time Machine disk and they didn't lose anything.

Time Machine is probably the best thing Apple's ever done for its users. Now, if only they'd bring back ZFS...