A useful tip nobody told you about.

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. Do not 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 data recovery as well as plain transfers between Macs.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Get two relatively recent Macs with FireWire connections.
  2. Get a FireWire cable with two “big” ends. Camera cables have one big and one small — that won’t work. These cost around $30, but worth it. If you have an iPod, it’s the same cable.
  3. Shut down the “target” machine — in general, the one you want to copy from. Connect the FireWire cable between the two machines.
  4. 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.
  5. Copy away. FireWire transfers are 4x to 40x faster than ethernet.
  6. When done, drag the FireWire drive to the trash on the main machine. Then shut down the target by its power button.

By the way: USB 2.0 sucks. Just take my word for it. It isn’t any faster — it just claims to be. Poor solution looking for a problem.