[Macworld]

Post your comments for FireWire target disk mode to the rescue here

[deemery]

I was similarly saved when handed a double-layer DVD to install on a machine that didn't have a double-layer capable drive...
Target Mode is one of the greatest "Mac tricks", I've shown this to tech savvy Windows friends and they've been blown away at how convenient and powerful this is.
(But in part it derives from the -markedly superior- way that MacOS, from the very beginning, has handled disks. I can't believe Windows users still have to worry about 'network drive mapping' and FLOPPY DRIVE LETTERS like C:!"
dave

[Schneb]

Except for those poor souls who bought a MacBook sans Firewire.

[fbcooper]

Unix. Unix. Unix. Lots of hard drives. Lots. lots. lots. Did I say lots? PCs are still DOS - not true computer OS. Don't they also have to worry about interrupts still?

[Cesium133x]

When I replace the boot disk of a Mac, I plug the new drive on a NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter, clone the old drive onto it with SuperDuper and then swap the drives. It's cheap and it saves one cloning step, plus it's mighty handy to have in case of (a relative's who doesn't backup as well as you do) near hard drive failure.

[MrPhotoEd]

I own a 17" MacBook Pro and love it. I was thinking of getting my wife a 13" MacBook, but how can you make a target drive with no Firewire port. I heard of a work around (with no details) with the MacBook Air. How do people work with around this? I can't tell you how many times Target Disk has saved my bacon.
Ed

[Kiminao]

Darn this log-in procedure--Schneb beat me to it with a comment similar to what I had in mind. Posters here can debate whether Apple was right or wrong in removing FireWire from the unibody Macbook for as long as they want, but in my mind, it makes no sense to remove something without replacing it with greater functionality (and no, I don't accept the notion that Apple has "always" purposely crippled lower-end products. Sometimes, perhaps but not always.) There really is no comparison between FireWire and USB (any version) for so many uses. This is just one of them.

[NeonSurge]

While firewire mode is really useful, and this little reminder of a hack above is great, reinstalling iChat in this method seems like such overkill. If she removed iChat she likely only deleted the .app from her Applications folder. In that case, would be simple to copy your copy to her computer... and just copied it to her over the network, you could have even used firewire for the network interface if you didn't have a ethernet cable around, a wireless network around, and were too lazy to create a wireless network real quick. Problem solved. No rebooting, no firewire mode, no DVDs.
tar -cpf ~/Public/iChat.app.tar /Applications/iChat.app
Then make sure sharing is on on your computer, then browse your public directory on her computer and grab the .tar and extract it on her computer. :)
Done and done. I agree with a neat reminder of a great feature Apple has implemented (but is now phasing out without a firewire port!) but this could have been done 10 ways without a DVD and without firewire mode.

[phillyman]

I also (like Mr.PhotoEd) would like to know if there are any alternatives to firewire target mode sans firewire. It always became my first thing to do when I had some hard drive problem on my mac.
I now have a macbook without a firewire and seriously considered the updated white macbook. In the end, I came to the conclusion that Apple/Steve has decided and we all more or less have to follow! I complained bitterly about the loss of the floppy and never missed it once it was gone. I also almost blew up when they dropped the internal modem on laptops and immediately bought the usb dongle which I used about once.
I DO believe that I will miss the target mode more so is there a way to use ethernet and as some kind of target ethernet? I presume no or else the helpful writers at macworld would have written about it, but one can always ask...
Phillyman

[Macuserbr]

This is one of the great features of a Mac which does not get enough attention in comparing Macs to PCs. Same for being able to boot basically unlimited HDs or partitions - including different OS versions from multiple interfaces. Additionally the ease of cloning any drive including the boot drive. This makes maintaining a group of Macs SO MUCH easier than Windows OS based machines - whether trouble shooting or upgrading a user to new hardware - too restore from an unformatted HD to up in running duplicate is very fast. No one seems to appreciate this until they have a serious crash/problem and even then it is well, helped this time but that will not happen again.

[spiderbat]

Target disk mode allowed me to service a vintage iBook with a broken CD reader. It is nice, intelligent feature that can prove itself as very useful in many cases, even in situations you haven't thought of before.

[mdawson]

Quote

fbcooper wrote:

>

Quote

PCs are still DOS - not true computer OS.

Well, I would not go as far as to make that statement. Wintel PCs have since Windows XP all been running a version of Windows NT. NT is not built on the MS-DOS core; those versions of Windows ceased development with embarrassment that was Windows Me. For reasons that seem to defy logic, or to retain compatibility for MS-DOS-based systems, Microsoft chose to retain the archaic letter assignment scheme for storage devices. Part of this also perhaps comes from the very different philosophies underlying the development of Windows and the Mac OS.

Windows sees storage devices (e.g., drives) regardless of whether or not media is mounted; hence the reason you see DVD RW Drive (E:) even when no disc is in the drive. The Mac OS sees mounted volumes (e.g., discs), so empty drives are not shown to the user unless the user goes out of their way to see what devices OS X recognizes as being attached to their Mac. The benefits of the latter over the former are obvious given that your Mac will never show you a drive that you cannot work with in a Finder sidebar, the Volumes folder or on the Desktop.

As to DOS not being a true computer operating system, I cannot fully agree. While quite limited having been designed for far less powerful PCs, MS-DOS?or any Disk Operating System?may not have the system-wide functionality of a modern operating system, but it was indicative of the time in which it was developed and the limitations of the systems for which it was developed.

[mdawson]

Agreed. USB is perfectly fine for the type of functionality for which it was originally designed, but it falls short when it comes to the types of uses that FireWire was designed to handle from its inception. Wintel users have no idea of how much the motherboard manufacturers that design the boards that the Wintel OEMs purchase to assemble their branded computers have screwed them by not including FireWire as a standard feature.

[JoxerTheMighty]

I've used target disk mode twice for setting up my Macbook, but never exactly as you describe. The first time was moving my id from my daughter's Mac Mini (which is what got me into the mac in the first place) - with my shiny new MacBook I connected to the Mini in Target mode, and pulled over all my settings, programs, music, etc. This was from Tiger to Leopard as well, and everything was smooth as silk.
The second time was two-fold: my Macbook refused to start up after a corruption of a system file, and I wanted a bigger drive. The Macbook would come up in TDM and all the disk utilities could be run and showed the drive physically fine. So I swapped in the new drive, installed Leopard, and put the old drive into a USB case (the TDM mode used here was really only testing, I guess, but I did make some data backups using TDM on the macbook from the mini - in case the next step failed). From there I once again pulled in my id and all my data in the regular fashion, and again it worked just fine. The only problem with anything I have using this is that it requires a re-install of the VPN software, which must modify the kernel as simply pulling across that doesn't work.