
Make sure the cable being used fits the FireWire connector on the Mac since there are different shape connectors for FireWire standards. Many laptops have PCMCIA or ExpressCard/34 slots that allow insertion of a FireWire card. If there is not a FireWire port on the Windows host computer, you will need to purchase an adapter for the system. Target disk mode requires the host computer (systems accessing the Mac) to connect via a FireWire port (or Thunderbolt with newer Macs) to the target Mac. Therefore, target disk mode allows forensic examiners to access the internal Mac drive as an external hard drive from another Mac or a Windows PC. Removing hard drives instead from a Mac computer can be time consuming and result in damage to the system when not performed properly. Select From another Mac, PC, Time Machine backup, or other disk then select From a Mac, Time Machine backup, or startup disk.Booting an Apple Macintosh in target disk mode allows computer forensic examiners to copy relevant files from the internal drive on a Mac computer. In this scenario, your new Mac (which you're transferring data to) is the host and your old Mac (which you want to pull data from) is the target.Ĭonnect the target and host, boot the target into Target Disk Mode as normal, then on the host launch Migration Assistant under Utilities. There's no faster way to achieve this than with Target Disk Mode. If you've bought a new Mac, you're going to want to transfer your old data to it. Transferring Data With macOS Migration Assistant A wired transfer via Thunderbolt is much faster than a similar wireless transfer using the notoriously buggy AirDrop. This is most useful for large files like videos, media libraries, disk images, and so on.


If you're used to transferring files between computers using intermediary media like an external hard drive, why not use Target Disk Mode instead? There's no need to copy from your Mac to a USB volume, then from the USB volume to your destination-simply move from Mac to Mac. Now that you know how to use target disk mode, you should familiarize yourself with some of the applications for this boot mode.
