Adventures in rescuing a corrupt HFS+ mac volume with Ubuntu linux

Over the years of working with Macs, I’ve often seen cases where a machine will fail to boot past the initial gray loading screen. Occasionally, this issue is easily fixed by booting from a 10.x installer disc and fixing permissions on the boot drive.

..but more often than not, it’s not a permissions issue that’s stopping the system from booting, and trying to verify or repair the filesystem on the drive will fail before it even attempts to fix it.

This isn’t even a huge deal if your data is backed up, or unimportant.. just reformat the disk and do a fresh install of OSX. This wasn’t the case this week when it happened again. One of the users I support had important data on the drive, and I knew I wouldn’t feel right unless I explored every option for retrieving it.

Cleaning an Apple Mighty Mouse

Many many years ago, the computer world collectively discovered that using trackballs to detect movement in a mouse was a terrible idea. Apparently, Apple didn’t get this memo, and decided to equip their only 2 button mouse not with a scrollwheel, but with a ball in order to add the uncommon and unnecessary function of scrolling left and right.

The downside, of course, is that these balls easily pick up dirt, eventually paralyzing it’s movement completely. Back in the day, mice always had an easy way to access the wheels under the ball, but in true apple fashion, the Mighty Mouse is designed to be thrown away when it becomes dirty.

This morning, I decided to look into the feasibility of cleaning it out, and after a quick Google search, located a gallery of images that helped me out.