Firewire Target Disc

Firewire Target Disc
Mac Tip #234/15-March-2006

Maybe you’ve just received your brand new MacBook Pro or other Apple computer. Maybe your old computer has a Firewire port, and so does your new one. This makes it easy to transfer your stuff from the old to the new.

For one thing, Apple has a Migration Assistant — a piece of software to do the job for you, but more on that another time.

Turn off the old Mac and plug the Firewire cable in to both machines.

Now press the Power button for the old Mac and immediately start holding down the letter T on the keyboard. If you have an external keyboard plugged in to a PowerBook or iBook, don’t use that one; instead use the built-in keyboard.

Keep holding down the letter T until you see a large yellow Firewire icon drifting across the screen, and then you can let go.

Now look on the screen for the new Mac. You should see an icon on the desktop for the old Mac. Just open up the icon and start dragging things across.

When I started setting up my new MacBook Pro I dragged my folder of photos across. That was about 10 Gigabytes of photos and took something like 20 minutes. Some smaller folders came across so quickly nothing even seemed to happen.