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Most of you who use macs on a day to day basis probably already know this, but today was the first time I’d really seen this little feature used. Aside from how we used it today, I’m not sure what else it’d be useful for…but it was pretty damn useful for what it was:
Essentially, my (boss? employer?) Steve Broback and I needed to trade files that were each about 800-850 megs—just large enough to be incredibly frustrating. After a few aborted attempts at sqeezing them on to CD’s, Steve whips out a firewire cord, and tells me to reboot while holding down the “T” key.
So what happens? Apparently, my PowerBook will boot up as an external hard drive that he can access from his, just like you would any store-bought external hard drive. About two painless minutes later, we’d exchanged data, and I was rebooting my machine into normal mode.
Now, while the result is essentially the same as hooking two computers together through a network and transferring a file over Cat5 (minus the reboot), the thought of turning an entire computer into a really fancy external hard drive was pretty funny to me.
{ 4 comments }
Josh 07.29.05 at 5:27 pm
I use this feature all the time. It’s great for all sorts of things in addition to large file transfers. One of my (admittedly ridiculous) current uses for it was to turn my offices old file server running OS X into a Linux server without having to actually reformat the drive or have any downtime while making the switch. I just installed Linux on a different computer and then when that was ready booted the old server into Target Disk Mode (what you’re talking about) and connected it to the new Linux server. Bam, instant Linux file server with next to no mess. And if something goes wrong on the Linux end I can just reboot the old server back into OS X and go back to doing things that way.
Jason 07.29.05 at 5:42 pm
That’s definitely one of the more creative uses I could think of using it for ;)
Good to know the name: Target Disk Mode.
Derek 07.31.05 at 7:21 pm
If you don’t have a cat5 of firewire cable, you can always make an ad-hoc wireless network. Bluetooth file transfer works too, but is significantly slower.
Jason 08.01.05 at 11:17 am
I’m really not as up on bluetooth as I should be. Isn’t that used mainly for interfacing with handhelds?
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