Earlier today I completely decimated my OS X partition on my MacBook Pro (ironically trying to make a non-destructive USB based linux drive).  The process went hay wire when I tried to get rid of a messed up EFI partition that was created and causing booting issues.  I deleted the messed up partition and then got greedy.  I tried to reallocate the space using the Gparted utility in Linux Mint (linux for the rest of this article, same for Ubuntu and all debian based distros).

Boot into the LiveCD:

The first step is to pop the LiveCD into the drive and hold down the opt key while booting.  Select the disc titled WINDOWS.  I know confusingly weird.

Prepare to see some terminal:

You are not going to listen to me now.  You are going to try to copy data from the recently messed up OS X drive and it is going to deny your permission.  Go ahead, try.  Now that we have that out of our system lets move some files.  You could get all nerdy and us the cp command, and if you knew that you wouldn’t be reading this article.  Fire up a terminal window by going to menu –> accessories –> terminal.  Next you are going to copy/paste or type:

sudo nautilus

This will open a window as the root user.  Next you are going to repeat the above command.  Following that you are going to navigate to the directory you would like to backup.  In the second window you are going to navigate to your backup drive.  Then you should drag and drop what you want to the backup.

Sit back and revel:

Now you look like a pro for having saved your (clients) data, and you can kick back and take a nap while the files transfer