You can format and repartition the drives, install the OS onto them (!!), back them up, whatever you want. Plug any computer into the mac that's in target disk mode and you can see each HDD on the mac over FireWire. Hold the "T" key down on the keyboard of a mac during boot, and instead of loading the operating system it'll load a simple firmware that exports any attached hard drive(s) over the Mac's FireWire ports, making the Mac behave like a FireWire external hard drive. Unfortunately it's useless with most machines as it appears to require a USB gadget or OTG port, or a FireWire port. This will make it much easier to produce bootable USB keys that export the host system's hard drives. UPDATE July 2012: Kernel Newbies reports that support for exporting SCSI over USB and FireWire has been merged into the Linux kernel. Unless you have an Apple you don't get it, and there's no longer any good reason for that. Target disk mode is great for data recovery, OS repairs, OS reinstalls, disk imaging, backups, accessing data on laptops with broken displays without having to rip the HDD out of them, and lots else. This is a tech support and service dream, and has been supported since Apple moved over to "New World" PowerPC machines with their Forth based OpenFirmware, ie for a very long time. I'm not an Apple fan, but there's one thing that consistently makes me really jealous about their hardware.ĭespite generally scary-buggy EFI firmwares in their Intel CPU based machines, Apple's firmwares support what they call Target Disk Mode.
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