Mac Tower HD Problem

[zhixuan]

Greetings all.

I'm currently having issues with a Mac Pre-Intel G5 Tower. Been working on it most of the day, but it seems to have lost the OS on the hard drive overnight when I shut it down. Well, if I could just use the super drive to boot from, this wouldn't be a big deal, except on this particular machine the super drive no longer reads discs. I've got a Macintosh laptop, and wondered if I could somehow use the laptop as a "external super drive" of sorts. Any prompt tips and help would be greatly appreciated.

[John A]

Hi,

The easiest way would probably be to start your Mac in Target Disk Mode. What this basically does is it allows your broken Mac to function as a hard drive for the other Mac, through a Firewire cable. Connect the two Macs, start the "good" one, and then hold down the 'T' key while the "bad" one is starting. You should then see its hard drive appear on the first Mac.

Network booting is kind of complex to setup, you'll need a special server. I've never done it before, but if you're really interested in doing it, there's lots of information on the web regarding this.

[Rick150]

When you have the other MAC connected via FireWire, on the Master (Laptop) go to 'Applications; Utilities & run Migration Assistant. Follow your nose, there are options for moving the OS onto your G5.