Note: Target Disk Mode is available on most recent Macs however, computers that do not have FireWire or Thunderbolt ports are excluded. This paper will be extended in the future to cover the slight differences when using Thunderbolt to replace USB mass-storage as an underlying. I feel like the data has to still be there in some form, because I haven't written anything to the disk since I borked it up. To make a Mac act as an external hard disk, you can put it in Target Disk Mode and connect it to another Mac with a FireWire or Thunderbolt cable, as follows. What follows is an analysis of the USB based target disk mode protocol, and also a revelation that the FileVault2 key may be extractable (albeit in wrapped form) from a machine without the OS booted. Each Mac must have a FireWire or Thunderbolt jack.
If I buy a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter and a Thunderbolt 2 cable, would I be able to use Target Disk Mode from my 2017 15" Thunderbolt-3-equipped work laptop? And would this in fact give the level of hardware access needed for lost partition/lost file recovery? Target disk mode turns one Mac (the target computer) into an external drive for another (the host. If the target Mac only displays the FireWire icon as shown above, then you will need to use the FireWire port to access the Mac internal drive from the host computer. However, the USB wouldn't boot on the old laptop, and the tech support guy at R-Studio said the only way I could do it was to run R-Studio on another Mac and read the drive using Target Disk Mode. using thunderbolt target disk mode Newer Apple Macintosh computers with Thunderbolt ports (faster than FireWire) will also display the Thunderbolt icon when going into target mode. It allows a computer in target disk mode to be mounted as an external hard drive by another.
I haven't had any luck recovering the data with freely available tools (I tried a few things on Linux live USBs, and I also tried the Disk Drill MacOS USB, which saw nothing), so I was trying to demo the R-Studio data recovery software to see if it could find the lost partitions and files. Target disk mode (TDM) is a bootup option on Macintosh computers. There's some data on it that I kind of want (nothing super important though). Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode Disappoints, Faster SSDs Rumored for Next MacBook Air, and More, The Book Review, 2011.07.08.
I have a late 2014 15.6" Macbook Pro with Thunderbolt 2, on which I accidentally wiped the entire partition table, including Recovery HD (yeah, I was stupid).