Mac Hack Attack
I have a 24″ iMac for home and a 13″ MacBook Pro for work. I love the small form-factor of the MacBook, but the limitations on screen real estate is sometimes a drag. The iMac has a gorgeous screen, but no video input to let me hook up my MacBook. What to do?
Mac Hack Attack!
The Mac platform supports a feature called Target Disk Mode. If you reboot a Mac while holding the T key, you can access the hard drive over Firewire from another computer. So for my setup, I boot my MacBook in Target Disk Mode, then plug it into my iMac using FW800. I then restart the iMac and tell it to boot from the MacBook’s hard drive.
End result: 24″ of screen real estate with no cross-contamination between the two systems. Reason No. 5967810 why I love the Mac platform. It just works.
Filed under hack, technology : Comments (3) : Jan 12th, 2010 by tadfad
January 12th, 2010 at 16:49
Or you can use screen sharing and save yourself four reboots. Ask Shane if you need help doing this. He’s good at computers.
January 12th, 2010 at 16:58
It’s true I am really good at computers. \/\/00t
January 12th, 2010 at 22:10
Good point–I tried the screen sharing for awhile but was disappointed by two flaws:
1) I was constrained to the resolution of the MacBook when viewing from the iMac
2) Even on a fast local network the lag was distracting
I’m willing to pay the cost of 4 reboots for super fast native resolution.