How do manually mount hard drive on mac?

Question

My mac recently gave up and I'm trying to salvage whatever data I can from the hard drive. I was able to boot using the OSX Installation CD and fire up Disk Utility that basically told me that the drive could not be repaired and I need to format it. My question - how can I manually mount it (from Terminal) and try to recover some of my data? I figured that if Disk Utility can see it, perhaps I could too. Thanks.

Solution 1

To mount disks:

diskutil list

see your drive and note id#, then:

diskutil mountDisk /dev/diskn

where n is the # you id'ed in diskutil list

Solution 2

You can try something like this:

mount /dev/disk1s10

And replace disk1s10 with the identifier of your drive.

Comments

[sa125]

There are plenty of disk* entries in /dev. How can I know which one is my actual drive? thanks again.

[JW8]

There are a few ways that I can think of. First get a list of all mounted drives before mounting the old drive. After you mount the old drive, view the list again - you can id it by process of elimination. There were a few other methods found in this SU post: superuser.com/questions/114515/… drutil and df looked like the most effective methods

[konus]

you can know the identifier doing diskutil list disk2 (i.e for disk2)

[Jake Berger]

sudo diskutil mount readOnly /dev/disk2s1 is what I had to use