Sunday, January 06, 2008 - 09:05 am, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
OK. Actions and results:
Shut down your Mac.
Using a Firewire 800 cable, connect the two Macs.
With your Dad's Mac awake, start your Mac with the power button while holding down the T key on the keyboard. When the Firewire symbol, a large dotted Y, appears on the screen of your Mac you can release the T key. It will be obvious when it appears. It will also wander around the screen.
Look at the screen of your Dad's Mac. You will see a volume mount with the name of your Mac's volume. You can open and access this normally.
Effectively, your Mac is now simply a Firewire-connected hard disk attached to your Dad's Mac which is providing all the brains for the show. Use his keyboard, mouse and screen for all the remaining actions.
Go to the Apps folder on your Mac volume and open Handbrake. Use it normally, opening and saving files on your Mac volume.
When you have finished, quit Handbrake (or whatever software you are running) and eject your Mac volume from your Dad's Mac in the usual ways ("File...Eject" or Ctrl-click on it and pick Eject or drag it to the rubbish). Your Mac should stop. Now disconnect the cable and restart your Mac normally.
All will be well. No software or files on your Dad's Mac and conversions done in half the time.
HTH
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Sunday, January 06, 2008 - 07:26 pm, by: Adam Peterson(President)
nice !
Do i need to enable any file sharing etc ? Dads laptop is his works computer and he doesnt have admin rights to make any changes etc. He is just a registered user. Will this effect anything ?
Secondly, where the heck am i going to find a FW800 cable ?
Sunday, January 06, 2008 - 07:44 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
Nothing to do with file sharing. It is just a disk, like buying an external disk with Firewire 400/800 or USB and plugging it in, except it will be faster because it is formatted HFS+ rather than FAT (just a side comment).
You should not need admin rights. I have them of course so I can not guarantee there is no problem but I am not asked for a password during this process. If you can log in to his computer, plug in your computer and restart yours, all should be apples, to coin a phrase.
The 6 to 6 or 9 to 6 cable will work (you have FW400 connectors) but be slower, a bit faster then USB 2.0. FW400 is better than notionally similar USB 2.0 because it places less load on the processor. FW800 is much better. Any of these using Target Disk Mode are superior to file sharing because there is less overhead. The disk is accessed more or less directly (single user mode) rather than using sharing protocols.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Monday, January 07, 2008 - 08:32 am, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
No
In the 80s I was part-owner of a small business which sold them, plus PCs and UNIX multi-user machines but in theory we were in the business of selling accounting systems and bespoke software to small business. All of our money was made on the Mac side and on training. Sold that business at the end of 1988 but have used Macs ever since, including when I worked at BHP IT in the 1990s. When the rest of the organisation was switched to PCs, I was allowed to continue alone with a Mac, having pointed out to my VP boss the cost and retraining problem to replace the specialised modelling and analysis software I had purchased myself for the Mac and used in my technical and consulting roles. I have run my own consulting since 2000 and am now pretty much retired.
Until last Saturday we had here an Xserve, four client laptops and an old spare one, with a multi-node wireless network but my son took his two Macs to Sydney with him where he starts work today. He is the expert these days. Both of our children are now working interstate which change in our lives is why I have indulged myself to ramble on a bit. Sorry about that.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Monday, January 07, 2008 - 01:39 pm, by: Adam Peterson(President)
Thats ok David, being a graphic designer i too have used Macs pretty much all my life, with the odd dabble on PCs. Ive only had 8 months experience with OSX and ive become used to it but im still learning many tips and tricks. If there was a problem in the office, they would all ask me to solve it and usually i delivered. I remember fixing our network printer problem when IT couldnt after 2 days of investigation and troubleshooting etc. Common sense prevailed and i got it to work by simply plugging in the network cable which had worked itself out from a recent toner change. Rambling on is fine, thats how you learn things.
I could ask you so many more questions about OSX that are bugging me
Monday, January 07, 2008 - 02:14 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
Have a go. I might know the answers and on this site there are other experienced Mac users who may well know more than me. Remember that I am just an experienced user myself. My consulting is unrelated, about the business.
A good place to go with questions, though, is www.apple.com/au/support/ They have surprisingly informative tech notes on a lot of specific issues. Also, dare I say it, try the Search function under Help in the Finder or resort to Google which will pick up forum discussions from various places.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Wednesday, January 09, 2008 - 06:46 pm, by: Adam Peterson(President)
Got another question. Apple havent really given me a straight answer.
As ive got the Powerbook G4 and my girl has the Macbook Pro 15" 2ghz, 100gb, 2gb Ram etc. Both have 10.4.11. I want to know how we can run Windows XP or Vista on them as well as keeping the OSX and switch between both platforms seamlessly
Wednesday, January 09, 2008 - 07:15 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
Her machine is easy. One option is to repartition the disk and run Boot Camp and install XP/Vista on the other partition. The disadvantage is that you boot into one OS or the other rather than seamlessly switching. It is the best solution if your main purpose for the MS OS is to play games.
The alternative for her machine is that you run Parallels or VMware Fusion. These run under OSX and enable you to switch seamlessly between operating systems. I run Leopard 10.5 and in another workspace I have VMware Fusion active with XP. The only difference in 10.4 is that you will not have workspaces.
Your machine is harder. The most recent product I have used in that environment (and have installed on my wife's G4) is Virtual PC, now a product of Microsoft and last I heard up to V7 although I do not know if it is being updated. It will provide similar functionality to Parallels or VMware, although the latter two will be much faster because they are Intel native rather than emulating that processor.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Wednesday, January 09, 2008 - 08:28 pm, by: Adam Peterson(President)
Well mine may not run a Windows OS and im ok with that. I personally hate the stuff lol.
Im happy to try the bootcamp option as i do not have Leopard 10.5. So by going down this path am i correct in assuming that to change OS's, all you do is log off user from the Mac and log back on to the PC OS ?
Also, what about software, do i have to install another complete batch of software in Windows format?
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Wednesday, January 09, 2008 - 09:22 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
Using two partitions, you reboot rather than logging off and on. You can do that under 10.4 on an Intel machine using a pre-release of Boot Camp. I seriously recommend the VMware option (or Parallels, but VMware seems more stable to me) if it is not primarily for games.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Thursday, January 10, 2008 - 02:05 am, by: Adam Peterson(President)
I have had a quick read on the Virtual side of things and it does seem interesting yet i know absolutely nothing about it nor know how to run it. Does it operate in the same way as Bootcamp ?
Thursday, January 10, 2008 - 09:54 am, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
No. Reiterating, with Boot Camp you choose at start-up whether you are running OS X or XP (for example). If you want to run the other, shut down completely and start up again,
With VirtualPC/VMware/Parallels, your always run OS X. If you want to run XP/Vista then you start the Virtual application and boot Windows inside it without affecting OS X operation. You can switch between them by clicking in the appropriate window and you can drag files between the two OS or enable either OS to see the files contained in the other. Here is a picture of an XP window open in OS X. The XP window takes most of the space on the 17" screen (you can size it normally) because I can afford to dedicate a workspace to it.
Note the Mac menu bar at the very top, the application bar on top of the window in which XP sits, and the usual Mac Dock and stuff on the right.
So, you can run one OS at a time or you can run both simultaneiously. Actually, you can create multiple virtual machines and run other versions of Windows (e.g. an old W95) or Linux under it as well.
PCs can also run more OS instances or Linux with VMware although they can not run OS X.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Remember, the Microsoft OS is not included. You use a normal copy of the MS OS and you might have one somewhere already. I am told that you can get keys for unlicensed versions ( = free = software piracy) but I know nothing about that sort of thing. PC wonks might.
Adam Peterson Goo Roo Western Australia Soarer DUB Edition
Tuesday, February 05, 2008 - 05:26 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
That is not correct, Braden, and you should so inform your source. Target Disk mode works Intel to Intel, G4 to G4, Intel to G4 and G4 to Intel.
To make absolutely sure, I re-tested both mixed modes before writing this post but in the past we have used mixed modes when my son recently upgraded from a G4 to an Intel machine, and have also used the G5 Xserve in TD mode during work on it some time ago.
Target Disk mode is a function of the Apple firmware and OS, not of the chip in the machine nor any hardware technology around it (other than Firewire connection of course).
By the by, an Intel machine in TD mode via FW800 is alive within about 2 seconds of startup. G4s take a lot longer. Once up, they all work impeccably.
Thursday, February 07, 2008 - 03:35 pm, by: David Vaughan(Davidv)
It is true that officially you are not able to boot an Intel machine from a PPC disk but that was not the question (which was to use Target Disk mode to run an application without putting the application on the disk of the system doing the processing) .
Intels require a GUID partition map to boot whereas PPC machines use APM to boot but can read a GUID disk and both can read MBR, the older Windows partitioning format. My god! We are showing off our jargon, aren't we (I)?
By chance, just this morning I was re-arranging two external disks using iPartition (which now happily works with Leopard) to split off space to use for "SuperDuper!" (a great utility also now working with Leopard), so I have recent form in the area.
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