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Targeted mode or what it is called - do I need firewire?

I

imMAColata

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 26, 2006
65
0
Could someone explain to me, or point me towards a guide that explains the various snazzy bootup-methods useful on a Macbook?

I want to buy a Lacie USB-drive to connect for my APE Base Station, ordered yesterday and on its way.

He mentioned that if you have a firewire drive you can do some snazzy booting up on another device. This doesn't work on USB, you MUST use firewire.

I am not exactly sure what it is you're able to do. I've heard about booting in "targeted mode" and other stuff. But what is it?

Is it possible for me to make a partition on the laciedisk and use that as bootdevice? This would be if my mac had a hd failure, perhaps.

Or is this just for using ie. a macbooks hd to bootup a imac? It sounds really great, so I want to make sure I do not buy a harddisk that locks me out of this option. But if its only for using one mac's harddisk (while its still inside its machine) to boot on another device, then I don't really need to go out of my way to get a Firewire interface for my external hd, do I?

I'm confounded :)
 
Target Disk Mode is more for copying files, as I understand it. I am not 100% sure if MacBooks can do it (IIRC the macbook pro can)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

that explains a bit more about what it is and how to do it.

I tried looking through their docs to find an article about various boot up methods but honestly, apple's search is appalling and I had no luck on that.
 
Target Disk Mode doesn't apply to drives, it applies to Macs - you can connect two Macs together over Firewire, boot one of them up in Target Disk mode, and it will act just like a Firewire hard drive - showing up on the other Mac's desktop.

Is it possible for me to make a partition on the laciedisk and use that as bootdevice? This would be if my mac had a hd failure, perhaps.
Click to expand...

Yes - if you have an Intel Mac (which you do) you can boot off either a USB or Firewire hard drive. PowerPC Macs can only boot off Firewire drives. So with either one, you can Mac OS X onto the drive and boot off it instead of booting off your internal HD. It would be a bit faster because an external 3.5" 7200rpm Firewire drive has better transfer rates than your MacBook's internal 2.5" 5400rpm drive. And useful for an emergency boot device as you said.
 
Target disk mode is different from booting up using a disk.

It used to be that you needed FW to allow you to boot up from an external disc but I believe this changed with the Intel Macs which I seem to recall reading did allow you to boot up from USB.

You can create a partition on an external drive and use one as a clone of your HD so that you can then boot it from any other Mac. However, I'm not sure how or if the APE disk mode handles partitioned drives.
 
I will get to test how partitions is handled by APE in a few days :) But it seems that with the intel based macs, having a FireWire or an USB disc carries no importance at all regarding their utility. (I do hear that FW is faster than USB 2.0).


I think I deleted the sentence in my OP, but my friend's wife has an iBook, G4, so this could be the reason he mentioned firewire as a requirement.
 
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