[SOLVED] Recovering HFS+ drive on PC

[skeptikaltruth]

Ok, so this is a really complicated one for my fellow TH community. Let's see if somebody can help me crack this one! (Moderator: If I posted in the wrong forum, please move to correct forum and accept my apologies. Thanks!)

So I have somebody's Macbook Air. It stopped working and was brought to the Apple store. My friend was told she needed to buy a new Macbook, pay for the recovery, and have all the files restored and moved onto the new laptop. The pictures were there but all important documents were missing and Apple couldn't help. So my friend took the original Macbook back and brought it to me.

Normally, I'm able to recover from MAC hard drives using MacDrive and UFS Explorer. However, this is one of those year specific Mac-ified solid state drives. I bought the correct reader for this drive as follows:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/USB3-0-TO-SSD-Hard-disk-Enclosure-Adapter-for-2013-2014-2015-apple-MacBook-Air-A1465/32787525814.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.vS9xNf

The Macbook is the A1466 model with the 128GB SSD. Reader works beautifully. Powers up, reads the drive, etc

Problem is UFS Explorer shows not 1 but 2 partitions:
HFS+ which is about 30MB
RAW which is 112GB

I assume all the information for the original OS which got corrupted somehow and turned into the RAW partition. I do not know how to access the files within the RAW partition. I also extracted an image of the RAW partition onto my computer so I can either try to access the files from the drive itself or from the image.

Please remember that I'm using a PC, not a MAC, to recover this information. It's a Windows 7 64-bit.

Any advice would be much appreciated. I've been working on this project for a few months now.

Thanks so much!

 

[Sarscarix041]

I would wonder if there was not something in the chain that could not handle more that 30GB. Do you have another drive you can try in the adapter? Errr MB. (Is that really 30MB?!) I take it you can not just install it in a standard M.2 slot?

My second guess would be that the drive is corrupted; I would try running file-by-file recovery on it. I would also try plugging it into a real Mac, if I could [sorry!].

(p.s. You probably already know that Windows can not handle the full HFS+ path length, but only a full path of about 256 characters. That is *with* Paragon HFS+ installed.)