Mac hard drive recovery question

[cwhiteside]

I am trying to rescue some data for a friend from an old mac desktop. The HD arm is failing. Problem is I have only done this on the PC side. Taking the drive out, I use a transfer cable to connect the drive to my macbook pro. I turn the HD on its side, to assist the arm, and hear it spin up. I am able to see the device on my machine and can run Disk Utility on it and get a report with no errors. At this point, I assume (as long as I do not move the drive, that I will be able to read from it long enough to copy down the data. Here's the problem were I am in unfamiliar territory: I am only able to view the core OS install files on the root of the drive (last look this was a month ago and I have forgotten the file extension, but assume they are the equivalent to .cab files for Windows...)

Question: is this a permission problem I am having? It seems there is a volume folder but I can not access it. How do I go about getting to the users' data? I am hoping that the disk was not baselined or something prior to me getting it and that his data is indeed still on the disk.

 

[Kaveman]

Get Info on the drive and check Ignore ownership on this volume at the bottom.

Then the files will be in /Users/AccountName