Last night I helped a friend recover his Mac after a system crash. (**)It happens – in this case probably due to a USB problem and OS 9.2 getting corrupted. DON’T UNPLUG USB DEVICES WHILE THEY’RE RUNNING.
But that isn’t what I wanted to tell you about. To recover, I used “Firewire disk mode” which is useful for this as well as just plain data transfers.
0. Get 2 relatively recent Macs, with Firewire connections. If you don’t have one, both the new iBook and the new iMac are amazing and (relatively) inexpensive.
1. Get a firewire cable. This needs to be a cable with two “big” ends (camera cables have one “big” and one “small” end so that won’t work). These are expensive, like $30, but worth it. If you have an iPod (…you lucky sod) this is the same cable.
2. Shut down the “target” machine. Doesn’t really matter which, but in general it’s the machine you want to copy “from”. Connect the Firewire cable between the two machines.
3. Start the target machine while holding down its ‘T’ key. You should see a big ‘Y’ shaped symbol come up. On the other machine, the target’s hard drive should appear (on the desktop).
4. Copy away. Copies over firewire are a LOT faster (between 4x and 40x) than over ethernet.
99. When done, “throw away” the firewire drive on the main machine (drag it to the trash and don’t give me any guff about that, I didn’t invent it). Then shut down the “target” by its power button.
By the way, USB 2.0 sucks. Just take my word for it. And it isn’t any faster, it just claims to be. Poor solution looking for a problem.