How can I mount my friends PC as an external drive on my mac?

rip out the disk, put it in an external housing, done, it’s like lego’s really, only you have to be a little more carefull with it

What iwamoto said.

yep, external hard drive enclosure…there are two popular types….SATA (newer stuff) and EIDE(older grey ribbon cable one). and then plug into the USB on another computer.

But it’s a laptop and I don’t really want to rip the HDD out of it :/

Instead of ripping out the harddrive (I’m guessing you want to reload the OS once you’ve rescued the files?—not that you couldn’t put the HDD back in, but that’s not the point), you could boot up with a Linux live CD (e.g., Knoppix), connect an external hard drive, and pull off the files that you want that way. Plus, you can maintain a backup on the external hard drive for next time this happens.

@aidje I’m not sure that someone who doesn’t know what to do already would know what to do once they were in Linux, yet alone find where to get a Linux disc. but not a bad idea…for someone not knowing what to do, the easiest and most straight forward would be ripping it out, and putting it back in (if you intended to put an OS back on).

No, no, I know how to do all that stuff. I’ve just never been presented with this problem before and I was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to directly connect to the HDD without ripping it out…before I tried the ideas I had. Too bad I can’t just boot it as an external HDD like I can do with a mac.

What Bri_L said

What wilhel1812 said.

I agree with aidje Knoppix has saved my ass on many occasions