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I have used a fusion drive with one ssd and one hdd in mac mini mid 2011. However, my mac's logic board broke and I cannot even get into the bootable usb. I want to restore data from my drive. Currently I've figured out that with working mac, I can mount my drive and move files. However that broken mac mini was my only mac. So if possible, I want to restore data on windows/linux(maybe hackintosh if possible)

Is there any tools for it? or should I find my friend to borrow mac for a day?

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    Personally, I would use the Mac to make a copy onto a different drive formatted so PC etc can read it, imho a lot safer that testing it on a PC and finding out it corrupts the data...
    – Solar Mike
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 11:39
  • I agree: definitely borrow a Mac. But please learn that you need to backup your data. Each part of a Fusion drive is a separate point of failure, and it's very easy to end up with nothing.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 11:52
  • @SolarMike & benwiggy - You don't need both halves of a fusion drive to rescue the data, just the HD will do, so long as you can hang it off something that can read it.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 11:56
  • Thanks for all. Since it was just a small homeserver with plenty of backups, don't worry about it. I just want to restore unimportant data, which was actually backing-up while my logic board broke... Then I'll find out my friend to borrow mac for it. Thanks!
    – mxlevsnail
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 12:04

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Physically, a fusion drive is two separate devices, an SSD & an HD. macOS 'bonds' these together in software to become a Fusion Drive. The HD contains all* your data, the SSD contains a small subset of the most-used data, for faster retrieval.
As far as Windows is concerned, what you have is a small SSD & a large HD. It has no idea of the concept of 'fusion'.

If you connect the HD to a PC, then you will be able to mount it in Windows if you have 'translation' software, such as Paragon's HFS+ for Windows. Without the software, the disk will be completely unreadable & your PC will ask to format it. Don't do this.
You could, of course, mount it on any other Mac without the need for this software.

*There may be some slight discrepancy of the data content of the two drives if the Mac had failed in the middle of a write/flush cache, but you would still have most of it intact.

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  • Sadly that program doesn't support fusion drive... Anyway Thanks for the answer!
    – mxlevsnail
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 12:05
  • It doesn't need to - the HD will work on its own.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 12:06
  • In the past, running macOS on non mac hardware had problems with iCloud and online services and not mounting filesystem. If you can’t borrow a Mac this might be worthwhile exploring if it can mount the HFS+ volumes hosted by the block level Core Storage engine and resurrect the virtual volume comprising the “fusion drive” data
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jun 21, 2022 at 12:16

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