Enabling Target Disk Mode

[winstonsmith]

I have spent a couple days researching target disk mode and am out of ideas. I've built two hacks on the same board, am okay on knowledge to a point but incredibly stubborn.

I want to boot the hack machine into target disk mode and leave it there as the machine holds all my movies, music, pictures, videos and time machine backups and it made sense (to me) to leave it all as is and FW800 it to my (real) Mac. Target disk mode works in the opposite direction so I know the cards and cable work.

I've taken out all the additional cards (video, NIC), reloaded Multibeast and installed EasyBeast without modifications. All is good. I understand what EFI is but can't translate that to my own setup or even if that is possible.

I have a Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L, current BIOS. The tonymac community is incredible and I used it exhaustively when I built my first hack. Be gentle.

 

[geekroick]

So essentially you just want to load your Hackintosh drive as any other hard drive on your main Mac?

If you don't mind the connection being slower than FireWire 800, why not buy a cheap USB SATA disk caddy and put your Hackintosh drive in that? You can get the caddies for a very low price. I picked one up at a car boot sale for £2. Not the solution you're looking for, I know, but a workable (and cheap) one, provided it's easy enough to remove your drive from the case your system is in.

My guess is that target disk mode is something built in to legitimate Mac hardware's firmware, which is why you're having no luck with it.

 

[DBP]

My guess is that target disk mode is something built in to legitimate Mac hardware's firmware, which is why you're having no luck with it.

Correct. Installing OS X onto a drive does not automagically imbue the machine's BIOS with Target Disk Mode.

Either pop the disks into a Firewire caddy so the Mac can mount them, or set up file sharing on your CustoMac so when you plug the Mac into the same LAN you can mount the disks. With gigabit LAN this can in fact be faster than FW800 (I was surprised at the efficiency, but can attest to this being true!).