Sudo /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtualBox You can’t launch it using the UI, or interactively log in as root on MacOS, so we’ll do this from the command line: Normally running VirtualBox as root is crazy, but we do have a specific justified use case here! In order to read and write to a raw block device, we (sensibly) need rather elevated permissions. Substitute in the disk identifier of your target disk.
Sudo /usr/local/bin/VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename raw.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 Assuming you didn’t elect to remove the VirtualBox Command Line Tools when you installed VirtualBox, run: When you are sure you have the right disk identifier, we need to create a sort of dummy disk image that redirects input and output to the raw disk. In my case, I’d booted from disk1 and the SpinRite target disk was disk0.ĭetermine the correct disk identifiers with: It is critical that you identify the BSD device name for the whole disk that you want to operate on. It’s certainly not an ideal situation to have to pull the plug on the computer while that VM has raw access to your target disk! Identify the Target Disk Turn off screen savers, sleep timers and screen lock, just in case the VM has taken keyboard input away from you and you are unable to unlock the Mac to check on SpinRite’s progress. Make sure you have VirtualBox installed, with the optional Command Line Tools.
I use SuperDuper to make bootable backups, and these work great for this purpose too.
#HOW TO RUN SPINRITE 6 FROM DOS COMMAND PROMPT INSTALL#
You’ll need a working MacOS install on another disk that you can boot from, as we need to unmount all the volumes on the disk to be scanned in order to gain raw access to the disk. All contractors must report to the site office. Hard hats must be worn beyond this point. Obviously, I do not accept any responsibility and cannot help if you break things by using these notes. Performing the wrong operations when you have raw access to the disk, a technique this process uses, can cause you to lose data.