The target computer (the computer to be placed into TDM) must: • Have FireWire or Thunderbolt Port • Have an ATA device at ATA bus 0 • Be any Macintosh except the following models: •
iMac (Tray-Loading) •
Power Macintosh G3 (Blue & White) •
iBook G3 models without FireWire •
Power Macintosh G4 (PCI Graphics) •
MacBook Air (2008-2010) •
MacBook (Unibody) The host computer (the computer into which the Target Disk Mode booted computer is plugged) merely needs to meet the same requirements as for any external mass storage device using the bus in question, and (if access to native Mac formatted partitions such as the boot volume is desired) support for the correct version of
Hierarchical File System. On Classic Mac OS, this means FireWire 2.3.3 or later and
Mac OS 8.6 or later are required to use a FireWire target. The host computer may run
Microsoft Windows, but with some possible shortcomings: to read a Mac's HFS-formatted partitions, extra drivers such as MacDrive, TransMac, MacDisk, or HFSExplorer are necessary. Users also must ensure their computer possesses appropriate interface hardware in order to physically connect to a Mac in Target Mode. MacDrive also has a read-only option to prevent any accidental editing of the computer in Target Disk Mode; however, this mode cannot be set after an HFS/HFS+ disk is mounted. With the addition of HFS drivers into Apple's
Boot Camp, it has also become possible for Macs running
Windows to read (but not write) HFS partitions, without the purchase of software. Users have separated these drivers from the main Bootcamp install, so that they now also install on other Windows computers. Host computers running
Linux are also able to read and write to a Mac's HFS or HFS+ formatted devices through Target Disk Mode. It is working out-of-the-box on most distributions as HFS+ support is part of the Linux kernel. The hfsprogs package may be separately installed to check the volumes for errors. As it is directly derived from Apple's open-source code for the macOS diskutil (diskdev_cmds), it should match in terms of supported features save for a lag in keeping up with Apple’s new versions. The new
APFS file system requires commercial tools to access from Windows. On Linux there are tools providing for read and (highly experimental) write access. No reliable check tool is available as Apple has not released the code for their fsck_apfs tool, though there is one apfsprogs written according to Apple’s APFS specification. In any case, for the purpose of data rescue, direct access to the file system is not always necessary: it suffices to save a
disk image file into a reliable storage medium so that a computer with the ability to read the file system can access it later without needing to connect to the failing Target Disk. Any operation that modifies the Target Disk in question should be avoided in data rescue; this includes not only file-system writes, but also file-system repairs. == Non-Macintosh analogues ==