On Jan 27, 2010, at 3:04 PM, Kris Tilford wrote:
On Jan 27, 2010, at 4:44 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
On Jan 27, 2010, at 3:06 PM, John Callahan wrote:
Would like to know if its necessary to unplug cable from port on
both computers when not in Target mode. Instructions say to drag
icon to trash, restart target computer and unplug cable. I have
been leaving firewire cable plugged in on both computers with
seemingly no ill effects.
No it's not necessary, and if you're not using your firewire port,
you can go ahead and leave it plugged in.
I don't know if this is correct? My understanding is that Target
Disk Mode makes the Mac behave exactly like any external FW HD. I
once booted a laptop into Target Disk Mode and then repaired the HD
using a Desktop which didn't have an open Firewire port because an
external FW HD was already using the port. I simply daisy chained
the laptop onto the open FW port of the external HD. After the
repair, I rebooted the laptop and inadvertently forgot to unplug
the FW cable. Now I had two Macs both booted, and BOTH had the
external HD mounted simultaneously. This appeared to cause problems
for the external FW HD that was shared between the two Macs as it
needed repair after this inadvertent mistake. Even worse, both Macs
had all three HDs mounted, so I felt I was just lucky that the
whole thing didn't go bad.
As far as I know, the only way to connect two booted Macs with a
Firewire cable is if you've setup Firewire as a network port and
then enable sharing between the two Macs. If you haven't setup this
network connection over Firewire, my previous experience seems to
indicate that you could be in real trouble if both Systems try to
access or specifically write to the same HD simultaneously. I felt
I was just lucky I didn't do any more file system damage than I
did, and I don't believe it's ever correct to have two booted Macs
connected by FW that aren't setup as "Firewire networking" previously?
This is just what I was warning about in my post. It is okay to have
just two computers connected, either for Firewire networking or with
one in Firewire Target Disk mode. But they can also be connected as
long as they aren't doing any FW communications.
Clark Martin
Redwood City, California
Macintosh / Internet Consulting / Railfan
"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"
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