{"id":75,"date":"2009-09-09T23:39:51","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T03:39:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lschofield.net\/technical\/?p=75"},"modified":"2009-09-09T23:39:51","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T03:39:51","slug":"starting-os-x-as-a-firewire-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/starting-os-x-as-a-firewire-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Starting OS X as a Firewire Drive"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PencilSketchPlugHead\"<\/a>OS X<\/a> has a couple of ways to bypass the normal starup process from your main boot device.\u00a0 One extremely useful one (for reasons discussed in a later post) is to start up OS X in “Firewire Target Mode”.\u00a0 If you hold down the “T” key when powering up, the machine will start up as a Firewire drive.\u00a0 The screen displays an extremely large version of the Firewire logo<\/a> on the primary display and you can connect a Firewire cable from the machine to another machine’s Firewire port.\u00a0 The computer should mount like any other external Firewire device, turning your computer into the world’s most expensive external disk drive.<\/p>\n

This can be extremely useful for copying files off a machine to another one, and in my case what made it especially useful is that it is easy to boot up a machine in Firewire mode even if the video is not working.\u00a0 You can easily hold down the “T” key while booting, even if the screen isn’t visible (more on that in a later post).\u00a0 Any other transfer off a machine usually requires either physically removing the hard drive, or interacting with the operating system to turn on network sharing of one kind or another.\u00a0 This is quite impossible when you can’t interact with the video.<\/p>\n

This also brings up the importance of encryption of sensitive information, since anyone getting physical control of your machine can boot it up and attach another computer to it.\u00a0 One encryption approach uses File Vault<\/a> to encrypt your whole home directory.\u00a0 This is very good encryption for someone that doesn’t want to think about it.\u00a0 I personally don’t use it for a few reasons.\u00a0 One, I don’t feel the need to waste my computer’s time encrypting iTunes songs, temporary internet files, and other trivia in my home directory that I don’t care about and that will lengthen a back up process.\u00a0 And two, it complicates the ability to pull off files like with this Firewire trick.<\/p>\n

Another encryption approach uses Disk Utility<\/a> to define encrypted file shares of my choosing.\u00a0 I define a dynamic file share and set encryption for it as needed for some of the categories of documents I store (like “Admin”, or “Financial”) and treat these file shares like top level folders on a drive.\u00a0 There are multiple encryption choices and only the files I want encrypted are placed in the file shares.\u00a0 These partitions are mounted or dismounted as needed for my work.<\/p>\n

So, with the mounted Firewire computer I was able to drag off and backup the encrypted and unencrypted files from the soon-to-be-shipped-off-for-repair computer.\u00a0 This made me feel safe about my data, and safe to ship off my computer with the sensitive files locked up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OS X has a couple of ways to bypass the normal starup process from your main boot device.\u00a0 One extremely useful one (for reasons discussed in a later post) is to start up OS X in “Firewire Target Mode”.\u00a0 If you hold down the “T” key when powering up, the machine will start up as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[37,71],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lschofield.net\/technical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}