Firewire File Transfer?

[swwack91]

If I take a MBP and directly connect it to a Windows XP machine with a Firewire cable can I "drag and drop" and transfer files b/w the 2 computers?

How will the Windows machine come up? Will it mount as a drive in the Finder?

Thanks for any help...

 

[Lovesong]

Nope. The Windoze machine wil not come up on your macbook. The only feasible way to do this is to have a Mac in Disk Target mode. Then Windows wouldn't be able to see the Mac anyway. Sorry- you might be able to do it with MacDrive, and then Target Mode.

Edit: Sorry MacDrive link: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

 

[swwack91]

But I can share files over a network right?

I've seen How-To's about that all over the place.

...it'll just be slower than a theoretical firewire connection

 

[thegrifman]

Apple has a good tutorial on how to do this with a network cable. That's what I did when I switched.

http://www.apple.com/ca/switch/howto/network.html

 

[scottij]

It works

I just did this yesterday.

It's pretty easy -- just share whatever disk volume you want to copy from on your Windows box, connect the firewire cable to both machines, and you can browse to your Windows box in the Finder. Just click on "Network" and look for your machine.

If both machines are also on another network (like a home wireless network) you'll have to disable filesharing over the other network connection on your windows box to make sure you're actually transferring over firewire.

That said, once I got it connected, I was only getting around 100 Mbps, so it may not be that much better than direct ethernet.

 

[jeremy.king]

That said, once I got it connected, I was only getting around 100 Mbps, so it may not be that much better than direct ethernet.

I too did this a while ago and found that IP over firewire was marginally faster than traditional networking (100baseT)