I got my
brand-spanking-new 800MHz iBook the other day. I was short on
time — finishing this book, in fact — but
couldn't wait to make the switch from my existing
Mac to my sleek, snappy bundle of OS X joy. How could I move all of
my applications and home directory
(/Users/rael)? I could do without the eternity
I'd have to wait transferring it over the network. I
didn't relish the number of CDs I'd
have to burn to bring across all 3 gigabytes. And the idea of picking
through the clutter on my external FireWire drive to make room left
me ill.
If only I could mount my old machine's hard drive
alongside the new one without tools and duct tape. Surely I could
just treat my old Mac as a hard drive somehow. I sure could, and did.
It turns out you
can mount one Mac's hard drive onto another Mac over
FireWire quite easily. You simply tie them together with a FireWire
cable and reboot one of them with the T (for target) key held
down.
TIP
This assumes, of course, that you have a FireWire-capable Mac on both
ends.
After just a few seconds, my old machine booted into
what's known as target mode, the screen blinking a
FireWire logo where usually there'd be a Mac OS X
login screen. A click, spinup, and whirr later, my old hard drive
showed up right on my new Mac's desktop.
Thanks to Macintosh's tradition of not spreading
installed software all over the hard drive, I was able to drag over
individual applications from my Applications
folder. I dragged my home directory over and logged out and back in
again and I was moved in, preferences and Desktop as
I'd left them on the other machine. And all that in
around 23 minutes, from boot to enjoy.
When you're done, eject the mounted drive by
dragging it to the Trash or selecting it and pressing
command-E. As far as the target machine's
concerned, just turn it off or reboot it when you're
finished; it'll come back up as if it were all just
a dream.
I cannot get it to mount with the DiskWarrior 3 boot disk or the TechTool 4 boot disk.
I have been trying to get it to mount on a PowerBook using target disk mode (TDM).
I can get the iBook to start up in TDM but it won't mount.
I've used "About This Mac" to determine the disk ID (Disk2 or Disk2s2 -- not sure which is right). I have used commands like:
mkdir /Volumes/iBook
and then
mount -t hfs -r /dev/disk2 /Volumes/iBook
No luck.
Here's the question. I am a unix know-nothing. My iBook had its drive partitioned into 4 segments (OSX OS9 Apps Work). Is there something special I have to do to get this drive to mount? If so, what will help?
Any help appreciated.
Please respond to: Oreilly@primavoce.org