No FireWire port on the new Aluminum MacBooks... Now what?

Douglas McLaughlin wrote:
Intel-based Macs can startup off a USB hard drive with Mac OS X installed on it. This gives you ability to access all files on the computer and will allow you to make a disk image with the Disk Utility.

Ok, so I plug the MacBook in to another computer, say a desktop, with a USB cable. The desktop computer will be used to create the disk image of the MacBook. I then boot the MacBook by holding down whatever key is used to boot it into USB Target Disk Mode and then make the Disk Utility backup that way? Is that how I do this? Since we don't have any USB drives at my job that we can use for this process, plugging directly into another computer would be our only option at this point. I typically have a spare computer in my office for just this reason.

A hardware failure of the drive will not allow you to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to recover files. If it's a software fault/file directory problem then booting from an external hard drive through USB will allow you to repair the file directory with Apple's Disk Utility or a more powerful utility like DiskWarrior.

I had meant a software failure. Sorry I wasn't clear. In the time I have been using computers (20+ years), I have come across only about a dozen hard drive failures where data could not be recovered without drastic measures. Any other time it would be something like software, a drive controller, a motherboard problem. More often that not when a drive stopped booting, It's because the user had gone in and changed the startup disk for whatever reason but didn't change it back. Then the computer sits there looking for something that doesn't exist anymore. An easy fix, but the user still get hysterical when their computer doesn't boot.

Really? Nowhere?

Again, here is where target disk mode comes into play. The Migration Wizard doesn't work for our setup. This is because of the way the user accounts get setup on the computers. The accounts are handled through Active Directory. Because there isn't a lot of server space to keep all of the files up on a network share we have the home directory set to to be saved locally. We also have the accounts set to be mobile accounts if the AD server were to ever go down, uses can still log in to their computers.

Because the accounts are set up this way the Migration Wizard thinks that they are Network accounts and gray's out the user account not allowing for the migration to occur. The best way we have found to move the data over has been with FTDM.

And as stated above, we all need to go to http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbook.html and give Apple our thought on this. If enough people give feedback letting Apple know how we feel about the removal of FireWire we stand a fighting chance of getting it back on the MacBook line.

There is no USB target disk mode. You boot from USB by selecting the startup volume in System Preferences/Startup or by holding down the 'option' key on startup and selecting which volume you want to boot from.

I found the site you direct Redclaw not to be that helpful for setting up the ethernet network for migration. And, indeed, I found the staff in the apple store and on their tech support phone line to have not been trained at all in what to do without firewire -- lots of misinformation on wireless and ethernet migration (and the woman on the tech support phone line kept telling me to make sure I was using firewire even after I kept pointing out this was impossible! and that I did already have an ethernet network set up).

I didn't mean to get to griping. All I meant to say was that the following site I found most helpful in setting up my ethernet network for migration -- including a list of which computers would need an ethernet crossback cable (mine did) and which can get by with just a plain ethernet cable:
http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/handson_mac_connecting_two_macs_via_a_simple_ethernetnetwork/

One caveat: if you are running anything below 10.4 on your old machine (mine runs 10.3.9), you won't be able to use migration assisant (10.5 hours of painful manual migration for me!), despite the fact that some of Apple's own webpages claim that if yours was a late 2004 model shipping with 10.3.4 this would be possible (I did confirm this on the phone -- indeed, insisted on talking to a second person beyond the woman who just couldn't get it through her head that there was no firewire). I found the following site most helpful in finding various preferences, bookmarks, etc. for the manual move:
http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2007/02/16/how-to-transfer-mac-os-x-applica tion-data-between-computers/

Add my voice to the ever growing list of people who will not buy the new Macbook because it does not have firewire, and will cease recommending Macs to any of my friends. I do not want and cannot afford an MBP, but I refuse to buy a Mac without fw.

Check here for Usb2.0 to firewire adapter:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250311685438

You have got to be kidding. That may convert the plugs, but there is no way it will convert protocols.

Alex-H wrote:
Check here for Usb2.0 to firewire adapter:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250311685438

1 I suspect that that's a USB to miniUSB adapter.

2 assuming that it was a FireWire to USB adapter, that's a FW 800 to USB adapter; you'd need an additional adapter to connect to FW400. You lose speed with each additional adapter.

3 again assuming that this is a FW to USB adapter, it will work at USB speeds at best... and probably much slower, as it has to have conversion overheads subtracted from whatever speed it can deliver. As the whole reason why I (and many others) use FW is that it's faster than USB, it would be of very limited use, as it would be considerably slower than USB which is too slow in the first place.

4 finally, even if it actually worked which I greatly doubt, it would not be able to deliver such technologies as Target Disk Mode. It is a USB device, and USB does not support TDM. It can't. USB's physical and logical design prohibits doing any such thing.

I did. And I also sent a snail mail. Not a nasty one, just a "how do I restore from my external Firewire disk" letter.

I will, but dont hold your breath. They are probably inundated with snail mail, email, etc.