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Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

The only thing I use FireWire for, Target Disk Mode, cannot be done with USB. This omission has made the new MacBooks a lot less appealing.

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An alternative is to use an ethernet cross-over cable and just use standard file transfer methods.

Or perhaps someone will write an os x driver to take advantage of usb-usb (aka usb bridge / networking) cables that work for PCs.

http://en.kioskea.net/faq/sujet-345-how-to-connect-two-compu...

The advantage of these solutions is that you can work with other non mac os x computers.

What they should have done is used the ethernet port for 1394c:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire#FireWire_S800T_.28IEEE...

Yes, lots of hacks and workarounds. Unlike Target Disk mode however it's not something I can explain to my parents over the phone.

Sorry - how exactly do you mount the disk of an unbootable Mac on another machine, via an Ethernet cable?

The protocol you'd use is iSCSI. You could hack this together with commercial iSCSI initiators on the working machine, and some kind of LiveCD target, but Apple would need to release an initiator in OSX to make it slick and easy. There is one for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs, and Solaris, so asking for this feature in OSX doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.

look up openfiler

http://www.openfiler.com/

put that on a boot cd and you're all set.

You can try booting off of a live CD which in most cases will allow you to mount the disk and access the ethernet port.

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