Turn a PC into a firewire device?
 

Hey all. I was wondering if it's at all possible to let a PC act as a firewire device. This would be so I could connect it by firewire to another computer and use its hard drives and cd roms. I've seen this done with 2 Macs, so I'm wondering if it's possible with a PC too. Also, can a Mac use a PC as a firewire device? Thanks for your help guys

I think you would be better served to connect them by Ethernet. Macs have a "target mode" where you can make a computer act as an external drive, but I don't think that there is a comparable Windows mode.

I sure wish there was a way. As far as I know nothing is out there, but I bet a motherboard manufacturer wanting to get ahead might just add it on as a little feature... wouldn't even be that hard imho. Just make a bios option for "HD mode" and reboot, voila.

Darn. Guess I've gotta shell out the money for a bunch of enclosures. Thanks guys

I doubt we'll ever see this for PC. The PC industry seems to associate FireWire with Apple and stays away - except for FireWire video capture. The lack of FireWire 800 ports on new PC system boards makes me wonder what the future holds for FireWire and PC.

Any reason you can't build a mini-network between the two with a crossover Ethernet cable?

I swear I *have* done this before, but out of curiosity I just tried, and couldn't get it to work.

if both machines are running WinXP and have any FireWire controller (embedded on motherboard or a separate PCI card), you should see "1394 Net Adapter" in your Device Manager and "1394 Connection" when you get Properties of My Network Places.

the functionality is natively supported by the OS. there's a TCP stack and File and Printer Sharing enabled there...

I don't want to reboot this machine to see if that needs it, so I'll try with the second and third machines later. This really has me stewing... !!?!?

I'd like to use my hard drives from the PC on the Mac, and I'm currently doing that through ethernet. I've been using PC Maclan and it seems to be pretty stable. But I'd also like to be able to use my PC desktop's DVD burner on my iBook, without having to take it out of the pc, and without having to buy a firewire enclosure for it. I don't think there's a way to share that through ethernet.

What's faster anyways? Firewire 400 or CAT 6?