Booting up vie Target Disk Mode

[thesnuffy]

I still have my old iBook that has either a fried screen or video card. So I purchased a MacBook to replace it and I booted the old one into target disk mode to transfer the information over to the one when I first booted it up and everything went great.

Recently, I had thought of starting up the old iBook into target disk mode and then using my new MacBook to boot up via the iBook like you can boot up a Mac from an external drive connected via firewire, so I could de-authorize the iTunes on it and just go through and delete some files. But I couldn't get it to work. Is it not possible to do this with a Mac in the target disk mode?

 

[mkrishnan]

I think it'll make more sense if you think about the logic behind target disk mode for a moment.

Target disk mode means that the entire Mac hosting the drive acts like a giant external drive for the other computer. It's only the drive that's being used.

You can boot another Mac off the disk that you brought up in Target Disk mode, but the other Mac needs to able to run the OS that's on the disk in the first place.

Your Intel Macbook cannot run the PPC-only OS that is installed on your iBook. That's where you're running into trouble.

 

[Sun Baked]

Also the Intel Mac needs HFS+ on a GUID partition, and the PPC is HFS+ on a APM partition.

Can't boot off the PPC formatted drive even if the OS was correct.

 

[thesnuffy]

That makes sense. I hadn't thought about the fact that the PPC and Intel Mac's would conflict in trying to boot off of one onto the other. Thanks for the help.

 

[mkrishnan]

No problem. Regarding de-authorizing the now non-functional computer:

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/12/itunes-101-deauthorize-all-computers-at-once/

Cheers.

I'd recommend one of the following:

- Remove the HD physically before you scrap the iBook and keep it (best option).
- Copy off everything you need and then use disk utility to erase and overwrite it with random data in target disk mode.

 

[thesnuffy]

Thanks again.