After four years faithful service the HD in my old iBook has finally given up the ghost.The problem is that I'm still on holiday and I had three days of photos that I'd downloaded off the camera but not uploaded to my linode box.

So I booked an appointment at the Genius bar in Las Vegas. I explained my predicament to the Genius, he tried booting off a firewire drive but the machine still locked up when trying to access the drive. In the end we booted it into Firewire target mode and he left me in a corner with a spare macbook to copy off the files onto a flash disc.

Total cost to me, 1x 8Gb flash disc, $45. Getting my photos back while the drive still spins up, priceless.

Try doing that with a Dell....

For me, the same kind of logic applies to linux and any hardware... I'd have dl'ed and booted a rescue usb stick and used the extensive tools on it to recover the data from the HD.

(Incidentally, without needing a spare laptop of the right flavour)

Interesting that the laptop supports acting as a firewire device though.

All Macs used to be able to do that (used to be done over SCSI though), if I remember rightly some of the recent ones don't have that functionality.

All Firewire equipped Macs can act as a disk, and it does indeed make recovery very easy. Plug the cable into any other firewire machine, and you can quickly grab files off of it. This works cross platform as well, since it's just presenting an HFS formatted firewire disk, and also any discs in the optical drive.

The only modern machine without the feature is the MacBook Air.

It's not as if HFS drivers are very common, though. Linux does have an HFS driver available. Windows has a commercial driver and a freeware explorer. Neither OS has strong read-write support.

A few small caveats - if the host is running OS X 10.3.9 or earlier it will not read the disk from an Intel Mac in Target mode. Also, formatting a disk on a PowerPC Mac will make it unbootable on an Intel Mac so be careful with that. But in reality I'd imagine those issues are rarely come across.

Its still a very cool and useful feature.

I think the point was the willingness of the person at the Apple store to help and provide space/time/equipment to facilitate Andy's needs. You're not going to get that at Best Buy or at the local HP store. Oh, HP don't have stores? Right.

I thought the same thing, but it appears this might only apply to internal drives. I can put my PowerPC Mini into firewire target disk mode, and then boot the drive inside the Mini on my Intel MacBook Pro. This is with 10.5, I know it won't work on any previous version since the kernel wasn't universal prior to Leopard.

Well, the cynic in me is saying that he paid $25 for the temporary use of a spare Macbook, but I understand what you mean. Besides, it's retail, and I understand everything's cheaper.

Although my local Microcenter sells 4GB flash sticks at checkout like candy for around $11.

Fair enough - I had no idea what a Genius Bar was

It sounded like a drop-in tech support place, not an Apple shop...

That's the tech support counter at the Apple Store.

Yes, that was the point I was making. If I'd been at home it wouldn't have been a problem. But being several thousand miles away from home with nothing but a charger and an SDHC card reader I was stuck.

I'm a big fan of Firewire target mode. I've rescued several headless XServes at work that way in the past.

So, of course this thread got me to visit youtube and watch the more recent "I'm a Mac" commercials (we never get to see adverts on MythTV, so..).

Anyway, tripped over the I'm a Wii ad while browsing.. NSFW, but very very amusing!

Cheers

I chuckled when I saw it too. I've never 'got' the Wii, I can't see past the previous-generation graphics.

With game play so good even I get out of my chair to play it, you don't need fancy graphics

For me most other consoles have lost the fun pick up and play element of video games. There is no way I have the time to play long term games that require lots and lots of work, I just want something to pick up and spend a few minutes playing, usually with someone else. The Wii is perfect for that.

I also have a pinball machine and a Mame arcade conversion in my living room, and these have the same kind features, rubbish graphics but so much fun

Cheers

Cris

PS - Even after my pretty rubbish genius bar experience, I agree with the whole Apple thing, I won't be buying a PC anytime soon (read as soon as they add bluray to the iMac I am there!)

The 360 and PS3 have their share of games like this too, however I think this is probably the worst marketed aspect of the other two consoles. Both have quite a few fun downloadable games that are quick to pick up and put down, and play with friends. They don't advertise this much at all, and since no box sits on the store shelf, most people simply see all the Wii games that appeal to them.

Nintendo did a great job this generation on returning gaming to the "fun" part and marketing it to a wide audience, while Sony and Microsoft were over in the corner making systems for the existing install base.