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On Thu, 16 Mar 2006, Jim Lawson wrote:
> Chris Ruscio wrote:
>
> >Does anyone know if there is a not too painful way to turn a desktop
> >machine into a big USB drive? (and if yes, How?) Mac's can do it, so
> >there must be a way.
>
> I think Chris is talking about the Mac OS X feature where the Mac will
> boot up in "firewire target mode". Essentially, you hold down F (or is
> it T?) when you boot up your OS X box, and you can treat the machine as
> an external firewire drive. It's good for backing it up, or getting
> into the filesystem of your powerbook when it won't boot otherwise.
If I understand things correctly, you can't do this with USB.
Firewire is a peer-to-peer protocol... there's no fundamental difference
between a Firewire port on a computer and one on a disk drive or a video
camera or whatever, so you can put two computers on the link, or two devices
and no computer, or whatever, without too much hassle.
This isn't the case with USB. There's a fundamental difference
between a USB host and a USB device, and while you can have more than one
USB device on a link, you can only have one USB host... no more, no less.
Since the computer, as a rule, has the host-end USB port, this means that
two computers can't communicate directly over the USB link.
If you really need to move data from one computer to another, and
your only option is USB, you can get external USB storage of some sort and
swap it between them, or get a couple of those USB Ethernet thingies and
link 'em USB->Ethernet->USB (though it's probably cheaper, faster, and
easier to just get a couple of proper Ethernet cards), or a couple other
similar methods, but I don't think directly connecting the machines USB to
USB is an option.
Linux *does* have support for being the device end of a USB link,
but it's for things like Linux on PDAs, where the machine has the device-end
port, and them you can't plug other USB devices into.
- --
John Campbell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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