If your older Mac’s display is broken, or if the operating system has become completely corrupted and refuses to boot, retrieving your precious files can seem impossible. You might assume you need to physically disassemble the computer to extract the hard drive. However, Apple included a brilliant hardware-level recovery feature designed exactly for this scenario: Target Disk Mode.
Target Disk Mode allows you to temporarily convert your entire Mac into a massive external hard drive. By connecting it to a second, healthy Mac using a Thunderbolt or FireWire cable, the broken Mac’s internal storage will mount on the healthy Mac’s desktop just like a standard USB flash drive, allowing you to quickly copy and rescue all your data.
How to Enable Target Disk Mode on an Intel Mac
Note: This process applies to older Intel-based Macs. Newer Apple Silicon Macs (M1/M2/M3) use a similar feature called “Share Disk” accessed via macOS Recovery.
- Ensure both Macs are turned off. Connect them together using a high-speed data cable (Thunderbolt 3/USB-C or FireWire).
- Turn on the Broken/Source Mac.
- Immediately press and hold the T key on its keyboard.
- Keep holding the T key until you see a Thunderbolt, FireWire, or USB icon floating on a dark screen. This confirms the Mac has successfully entered Target Disk Mode.
- Now, turn on your Healthy/Host Mac and log in normally.
- Look at the desktop of the healthy Mac. You should see a new hard drive icon appear, representing the internal storage of the broken Mac.
- Double-click this drive to browse the files, navigate to the
/Users/folder, and drag-and-drop your important data onto the healthy Mac.
Once you have rescued all your data, right-click the Target Disk drive icon on the healthy Mac’s desktop and select Eject. You can then safely unplug the cable and hold the power button on the broken Mac to turn it off.