PC Equivalent to Mac Target Disk Mode

Factual Questions
1

I recently was given the chance to observe a very cool Macintosh feature called target disk mode, where if you booted up while holding a particular key combination, you could plug the computer into some other machine, and the machine could access the hard drive as if it were a USB or Firewire device.

Is there some way to do this with a PC? It’d be very helpful to all of us here. Thanks!

2

Not easily since a) It would require BIOS/OS support for this (USB drivers, file system drivers, etc.) and I do not know of any BIOS/OS that supports such a boot mode b) It would require the USB hardware in the PC to be able to act in mass storage mode, which most USB adapters are unable to do.

3

Not that elegantly but there are two ways two achieve the same effect:

  1. Install the second harddrive as a slave on the first machine
  2. Buy an external harddrive enclosure and install the second harddrive into that (they do come with USB connections).
4

Because apple has total control of the hardware, it can do something like this. For it to happen in a PC would require every BIOS maker and every USB chipset to support such a feature. Not impossible, but certainly very, very hard.