Fortysomething Geek

One of the best feature of Apple hardware is Target Disk Mode. The icons you see below indicates that this particular mac is now an external hard disk.


Apple has had some pretty cool hardware innovations throughout the years/decades.For example, in 1987, the Macintosh II was the first personal computer to support dual/multi-monitor displays. Since the early nineties, Apple computers had auto-sensing, auto switching ethernet ports that allowed you to connect computers together without a hub or cross-over cable. These technologies are now taken for granted and are available for Windows and Linux users. However, Apple is the only computer brand of hardware that has the nifty feature called Target Disk Mode.

With a keyboard combo press at boot, you can turn your macbook, mac mini, imac, or mac pro into a bootable, external hard drive. The "target" computer will be seen as a portable hard drive by another computer. This is a very unique feature of Apple hardware. In fact, many of my friends and colleagues do not know this even exist.

You can use this to clone and deploy software builds. You can use to trouble shoot hardware defects of the target computer. I remember when the very first iPod came out, we deployed software builds with a 12" powerbook and an iPod 5GB using Target Disk Mode. All the Mac Workstations were built, clone and restored in less than 10 minutes. Firewire back in those days was light years ahead of USB 1.0.

Target Disk Mode now supports thunderbolt so you can shuttle large files quickly from mac to mac. For example, I know people who take their SSD powered Macbook Air on photo and video shoots. They create gigabytes of footage and proof their work remotely. When they get to the office, they target mode their Air's to their main Mac Pro workstations. They get 300 Mb/s transfer speed over Thunderbolt and it is 10-20 times faster than conventional firewire/usb. As you can see, there are many numerous usage for Target Disk Mode.



Today, I used Target Disk Mode to clone the factory fresh drive of a 2012 Macbook Pro 13" 5400 rpm drive to a 512GB Sata 6 SSD drive. There is no need to remove the internal drive. There is no need for a bootable USB stick to run a cloning software like Clonezilla.

Maybe someday, other platforms will have this unique and neat feature.


WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Disk_Mode

So I am getting a new computer this week. As usual, I follow a strict methodology of preparation for new equipment.

Today's post will be about CloneZilla (http://clonezilla.org/).
In short, CloneZilla is a free Linux based disaster recovery imaging system like Norton Ghost.



Whenever I get a new computer running Windows or Linux, I run clonezilla. Before even booting it, I always clone the drive into a disk image. The drive may be 750GB but the OS install and apps may only take up 20GB. Using clonezilla, I save a factory fresh, ready-to-restore image to a portable drive or to a NAS server (via SFTP). In the event I want to sell an older computer, I can restore the drive to its factory original state.

After I install my applications and set up my system, I do another clone image in case of disaster, viruses, or anything unexpected.

Clonezilla can be installed on to a bootable USB stick or CD.

Usage is very straightforward. You pick a drive or partition you want to clone. You can clone to another drive or as image files. The image files can be an external drive or to a remote server volume. The image files are chunked into small pieces so they can fit on file-systems like FAT32.

Restoring is the opposite process. It interface is old school command-line menu. There is nothing to click and it isn't pretty but it works.

Instead of a barebone Clonezilla install, I suggest PartedMagic. PartedMagic is a complete bootable Linux distro with a bunch of tools which include Clonezilla, Gparted (for redoing partitions), Trucerypt, TestDisk (for recovering files off a crashed hard drive), and a bunch of other recovery applications.

In addition to physical machines, I routinely use CloneZilla along with Gpart to upsize or enlarge Virtual Machine images. For example, if I have a 8GB VM that I want to grow to 20GB, I use Clonezilla to clone and gpart to increase the partition size. Hence, I suggest using a distro like PartedMagic.

More info on PartedMagic can be found here: http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

On the mac, there is always Carbon Cloner. Macs have the beauty using of Target Disk Mode which is where a mac can be booted into a disk drive mode that another mac can mount and use. Hence, I never had to use anything like Clonezilla for imaging on a macintosh.