Connecting a Mac and a PC via Firewire

[mduser63]

I've got some very large video files that I need to transfer from a PC to my new PowerMac. Does anyone know how to connect the two computers via Firewire? I know if it were two Macs I was dealing with, I could just use Firewire target disk mode, but I've read in several places that PCs won't recognize Firewire target disk mode Macs as Firewire drives. Supposedly it's possible to set up networking over Firewire, but as is the norm with PCs, I'm betting it will be much harder than it sounds. Can anybody help with detailed instructions? I'd go ahead and just use ethernet except that the PC doesn't have an ethernet port, and there are no free PCI slots to add one.

Thanks!

 

[Sun Baked]

Search "IP over Firewire"...

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300742 -- Gotchas

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=152307 -- Howto

 

[mduser63]

Thanks Sun Baked. I got it working. For anyone else who's curious, it was pretty easy. Just connect the two computers together with firewire. On the Mac, create a new location (I called mine Direct Firewire) in Network Preferences. Make it so that the only network port that's turned on is Firewire (you'll have to add it manually to the list). Next, assign a manual IP address of 10.0.0.1 (or whatever) and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. On the PC, do the same sort of thing, only use 10.0.0.2 for the IP address. Turn on FTP access on the Mac in the Sharing preferences. Open an FTP client on the PC (I used FileZilla), and type "ftp://10.0.0.1/yourshortusername" for the address, where "yourshortusername" is your short username on the Mac. You'll also need to enter your username and password. The connection is on port 21. The connection didn't work for me until I turned passive FTP on. Once you've done all that, hit connect, and you should be able to start transferring files.