Firewire and FlowerPower

Nicole's FlowerPower Mac had a CD drive running OS X Jaguar (10.2). Our iMac 17" Flat Panel came with OS X Panther (10.3). I was troubleshooting a problem she was having with her keyboard, and decided to upgrade her system. The problem was, the Panther install was on a DVD, and the Flower Power only had a CD Drive.

I searched far and wide using Google trying to figure out how to boot up the contents of the DVD on her Mac. You can't just copy the files over. Can't boot off a network-shared drive (without a Mac OX Server.) The DVD contents are way too large for a CD. I don't have an external drive.

Then I ran into the concept of using Firewire to connect two Macs. One Mac can be set to boot up in "Target" mode by just holding down the letter "T" when booting up. I was able to start up Nicole's Mac in target mode, then connnect the new iMac via a Firewire cable. The FlowerPower Mac's hard disk acted just like a second hard drive on the newer iMac, so I was able to set Nicole's hard drive to be the boot drive for the iMac. In the photo below, the 17" flat panel iMac is using the FlowerPower's hard drive to start up, so it looks like the FlowerPower Mac is inside the iMac. (The FlowerPower's screen is showing the Firewire icon meaning it is in target mode.) The glowing blue Firewire LED makes it all look cooler.

I was able to use the new iMac's DVD to upgrade Mac OS X on the FlowerPower Mac. Apple is always building unexpected but useful things like "Firewire target mode." (It is really like built-in SCSI in older Macs.... which was advanced for its day.)

The other cool thing about this photo is that I recently learned how to use the manual mode on my digital Cannon. This allows for an otherwise impossible shot like this where the screens would be overexposed because of the dark surroundings.