Umm, yea

gamer2 · Post by **gamer2** » Wed May 17, 2006 3:28 pm

I noticed a coard at wal-mart today thatwould let me hook 2 computers together (usb). 3 Questions about this thing

1-Will i be able to connect it to both my laptop (which wont boot) and my compy, and expect it to work?

2-Will i beable to run a restore or boot disc off of my working computer and have it work on my non working one?

3-would the OSs have to be the same ala XP-XP, OSX-OSX

Please help?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Wed May 17, 2006 3:52 pm

To my knowledge those USB cables are nothing more then bi-directional data transfer cables. It shouldn't make any differnece if the OS is Windows or OS X as USB is a univeral protocall that both support natively.

If you want to fix the boot issue on your laptop, try going into the BIOS and setting it to netowrk boot. Then I would suggest getting something like a linux distro and setting it up to boot any computer on the lan/network. Once you have the laptop booted you can see what might be wrong and fix it.

P.S. If you hard drive is formated NTFS, you have to find a utility that will support writing on that file system. Look on digg.com they had a story about that that you can use to get the tools you might need.

gamer2 · Post by **gamer2** » Wed May 17, 2006 4:24 pm

Wwell what format is Windows Xp? is it NTFS?

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Wed May 17, 2006 4:30 pm

gamer2 wrote:Wwell what format is Windows Xp? is it NTFS?

Thats what my HD is.

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Wed May 17, 2006 4:44 pm

if you laptop dosent boot its not going to boot off of a usb cable. at least ive never seen bios that supports "USB" as a boot device.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Wed May 17, 2006 4:50 pm

Doesn't USB count as a removable device?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Wed May 17, 2006 6:19 pm

timmeh87 wrote:if you laptop dosent boot its not going to boot off of a usb cable. at least ive never seen bios that supports "USB" as a boot device.

The BIOS release in the past two years support USB booting. So if the BIOS his laptop has doesn't support it, he could see if an updated version does. There is no garentee but it's worth a try. I will say this, even if you can boot off a USB, I don't think a USB transfer cable is what you really want to use.

sgtpepper · Post by **sgtpepper** » Wed May 17, 2006 6:37 pm

gamer2 wrote: 3-would the OSs have to be the same ala XP-XP, OSX-OSX

Please help?

Well I'm not a PC guy, but the only thing a Mac is going to let you transfer over is firewire, just so you know.

gamer2 · Post by **gamer2** » Thu May 18, 2006 6:22 am

Sparkfist wrote:
timmeh87 wrote:if you laptop dosent boot its not going to boot off of a usb cable. at least ive never seen bios that supports "USB" as a boot device.
The BIOS release in the past two years support USB booting. So if the BIOS his laptop has doesn't support it, he could see if an updated version does. There is no garentee but it's worth a try. I will say this, even if you can boot off a USB, I don't think a USB transfer cable is what you really want to use.

well my laptop is around a year old, maybe older. perhaps there is a chance. What other transfer cables could i use? My Compy dont have ethernet, and my laptop dont have parallel ports such as a printer port.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Thu May 18, 2006 7:16 am

You could just try a USB drive with linux or something on it.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Thu May 18, 2006 7:21 am

vskid wrote:You could just try a USB drive with linux or something on it.

^That, or see if you can boot a CD/DVD distro. There's limites to what you can do if you don't have a ethernet port. Also you don't want to ever network computer together with a parallel port, it's really slow.

sgtpepper · Post by **sgtpepper** » Thu May 18, 2006 7:27 am

Sparkfist wrote:
vskid wrote:You could just try a USB drive with linux or something on it.
^That, or see if you can boot a CD/DVD distro. There's limites to what you can do if you don't have a ethernet port. Also you don't want to ever network computer together with a parallel port, it's really slow.

If you're going to boot off a live CD, Ubuntu is a great one, and best of all it's free, so it's worth a shot..

dankicksass · Post by **dankicksass** » Thu May 18, 2006 1:27 pm

sgtpepper wrote:
Sparkfist wrote:If you're going to boot off a live CD, Ubuntu is a great one, and best of all it's free, so it's worth a shot..

Truthfully, Ubuntu is a poor excuse for an OS and is unbearably slow and difficult to manuvre files with for restoration purposes. I don't recommend using their CDs for anything but coasters.

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Thu May 18, 2006 2:10 pm

pcmcia network card?

does it have an open miniPCI slot?

sgtpepper · Post by **sgtpepper** » Thu May 18, 2006 4:53 pm

dankicksass wrote:
sgtpepper wrote:
Sparkfist wrote:If you're going to boot off a live CD, Ubuntu is a great one, and best of all it's free, so it's worth a shot..
Truthfully, Ubuntu is a poor excuse for an OS and is unbearably slow and difficult to manuvre files with for restoration purposes. I don't recommend using their CDs for anything but coasters.

Well it runs fine on PowerPC hardware (if that's much different). But yeah of course a live CD is going to be slow!

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Umm, yea

Re: Umm, yea