MacBook Pro Dead Display + Remote Sharing / SSH

duren · 01-02-2013, 12:05 PM

Folks,

I have an A1226 macbook pro which has finally suffered the fate of the death of the NVidia 8600GT chip on both internal and external displays.

The mac though still boots with the sound and appears on my wireless network. Foolishly, I did not prior to the warning signs, enable SSH or remote sharing. I would like to do so now..

I do not have access to a similar model macbook, thus my idea was to remove the HDD and attach it via USB to an OSX installation in VMWare to get access to the disk..

Once I have access to the filesystem, can I

1. chroot somehow?
2. run the commands to enable sshd and vnc?
3. what are the commands on osx lion?

Thanks in advance...

fracai · 01-02-2013, 12:43 PM

You might just try booting that other OS X machine from the drive of the failed device. I'm not even sure if there are simple commands that you can run to enable ssh and vnc.

Are you looking to get data from this disk? Or do you want to still use the machine for some task?

duren · 01-02-2013, 02:02 PM

As I mentioned, I don't have a similar machine to boot that drive from.. and I wanted to use this dead one for encoding using HandBrakeCLI, I happened to make a time machine backup of it just before it died.

I found that I can enable SSH in Lion via terminal and it looks like I can do the same with screen sharing (can't have any links in my posts yet

)

The only question is, how does this all work with permissions if I'm not booted from that system, hence my initial question of chrooting... do I even need to do that? Will I just be able to modify files as is if I have root perms to the booted OSX installation?

trevor · 01-03-2013, 12:15 PM

If you attach the MacBook Pro drive to another computer running OS X (or any other computer running any operating system that can read/write HFS+ drives), then you will have the ability to read and write to it with your permissions on the other computer.

For example, hook it up to an OS X computer where you have administrator privileges, and you can use sudo from the command line to read and write to any file. Heck, if the UID of the account on the other OS X computer coincides with the UID of the account owner of the files, you may not even need sudo, you will be able to read/write to it without any escalation of privileges. (UID is the identification number of the account. In OS X, UIDs for regular login accounts start at 501 for the first account created and go up from there.)

chroot is not needed or helpful.

Trevor

01-02-2013, 12:05 PM	#1
duren Prospect Join Date: Jan 2013 Posts: 2	MacBook Pro Dead Display + Remote Sharing / SSH Folks, I have an A1226 macbook pro which has finally suffered the fate of the death of the NVidia 8600GT chip on both internal and external displays. The mac though still boots with the sound and appears on my wireless network. Foolishly, I did not prior to the warning signs, enable SSH or remote sharing. I would like to do so now.. I do not have access to a similar model macbook, thus my idea was to remove the HDD and attach it via USB to an OSX installation in VMWare to get access to the disk.. Once I have access to the filesystem, can I 1. chroot somehow? 2. run the commands to enable sshd and vnc? 3. what are the commands on osx lion? Thanks in advance...

01-02-2013, 12:43 PM	#2
fracai MVP Join Date: May 2004 Posts: 2,012	You might just try booting that other OS X machine from the drive of the failed device. I'm not even sure if there are simple commands that you can run to enable ssh and vnc. Are you looking to get data from this disk? Or do you want to still use the machine for some task? __________________ i am jack's amusing sig file
$fracai is offline$

01-03-2013, 12:15 PM	#4
trevor Moderator Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Boulder, CO USA Posts: 19,551	If you attach the MacBook Pro drive to another computer running OS X (or any other computer running any operating system that can read/write HFS+ drives), then you will have the ability to read and write to it with your permissions on the other computer. For example, hook it up to an OS X computer where you have administrator privileges, and you can use sudo from the command line to read and write to any file. Heck, if the UID of the account on the other OS X computer coincides with the UID of the account owner of the files, you may not even need sudo, you will be able to read/write to it without any escalation of privileges. (UID is the identification number of the account. In OS X, UIDs for regular login accounts start at 501 for the first account created and go up from there.) chroot is not needed or helpful. Trevor __________________ How to ask questions the smart way Last edited by trevor; 01-03-2013 at 05:35 PM.

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01-02-2013, 02:02 PM	#3
duren Prospect Join Date: Jan 2013 Posts: 2	As I mentioned, I don't have a similar machine to boot that drive from.. and I wanted to use this dead one for encoding using HandBrakeCLI, I happened to make a time machine backup of it just before it died. I found that I can enable SSH in Lion via terminal and it looks like I can do the same with screen sharing (can't have any links in my posts yet ) The only question is, how does this all work with permissions if I'm not booted from that system, hence my initial question of chrooting... do I even need to do that? Will I just be able to modify files as is if I have root perms to the booted OSX installation?