[rotuts]

Hello
Im trying to connect two older imacs to put OS X on the second imac as it has a damaged CD reader. they do not have firewire connectors and are vintage of < 300 mhz machines.

A wile ago at the Apple store the genius said that two macs could be connected via crossover ethernet cable but the target required a two key combo on startting to get to target mode.

this was not in ref to these old imacs, but Id like to give one away with OS X on it.

does anyone remember the two key combo for this to work? Id like to get the 2d HD to appear on the imac with OS X on it and then use disk utility on that machine to reformat the HD on the target and then use CarbonCopy Cloner to set up the second imac.

thanks rotut

[Detrius]

This is not true.

You can boot one mac from another mac using a netboot server, but there is no "ethernet target disk mode."

[rotuts]

Sorry, I don't know what a net boot server is

can you clarify?

thanks rotyut

[Detrius]

Originally posted by rotuts:
Sorry, I don't know what a net boot server is

can you clarify?

thanks rotyut

That was more of an FYI than a "you should try this." Netbooting is when you boot a machine over a network. This either requires OS X Server or a Unix übergeek at the command line.

[tooki]

Target Disk Mode (TDM) exists on SCSI PowerBooks and on all FireWire Macs with AGP graphics.

You cannot do TDM over ethernet or USB.

Netboot/NetInstall is effectively irrelevant here. Pretend it didn't exist, because it requires Mac OS X Server, which requires comparatively advanced Mac administration knowledge to set up, and it costs lots of money.

There is no solution for the problem you describe other than to replace the broken CD-ROM drive, or to temporarily swap the hard drive for the install.

tooki

[turtle777]

Originally posted by rotuts:
A wile ago at the Apple store the genius said that two macs could be connected via crossover ethernet cable but the target required a two key combo on startting to get to target mode.

Some Mac geniuses really suck, knowledge wise...

Besides that, I think tooki is right.
I can't think of a solution for your problem besides replacing the CD-ROM drive...

-t

[MacBHoward]

I had the same problem. I took the initialized hard drive out of the iMac with the bad CD player,installed it in the other iMac, installed the new system, then swapped the drives back again.