Help! I need to backup a hard drive that wont mount on disk utility

[ruth dorey]

My mac hard drive has "failed", when i turn my laptop on it obiovusly not loading the operating system and it showing me only a few programs including terminal and disk utility (i'm sure some of you are familiar). The laptops hard drive is un-mountable on disk utility, i need to know how i can back up my entire hard drive (about 700 GB) onto an external hard drive

when i tried to repair it on disk utility it gave me a message saying it can't perform a repair and that i need to backup as soon as possible and re-format the hard drive.

as for permissions, disk utility doesn't have a raised button on the "repair permissions" so if this is an obstacle to backing up i might need to know how to fix that too

i have a new, fully compatible/formatted external with 1TB space. i have stupidly never backed up before but i don't use my laptop for work, still it would be sad to loose my pictures/films, writing and music. i don't have Time Machine activated

from my extensive reading today on other forums i guess i need to use terminal to backup? if so how? i am hesitant to even turn the laptop on until i know what to do in case it causes any more damage

would be grateful for any help

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Try FireWire Target Disc Mode ... you need another compatible Mac, connect both with FireWire cable mounting your failed HD on the Desktop of the 2nd Mac. Then using a free program like Carbon Copy or SuperDuper you could clone the drive onto the 1TB ext drive, also connected to the 2nd Mac, creating a bootable copy of the failed Mac's internal HD. Ask away if you're not sure about anything ...

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