I know I should know this, but I don't, I'm sorry to say.

Is there some way to boot a firewire-less Mac into target disk mode?

Also, is there software that will check for corrupt fonts?

Hold down the T key at reboot on the target, the one you want to turn into an external HD.

Moe.

The font thing? Still a pain after all these years. There is Font Doctor from Extensis, but sometimes it breaks more than it fixes.

Give me some detail on what-up.

My MBA had a kernel panic, and the report of the crash referred to a font file, so I figured that there must be some problem with a font. My desktop has also been crashing and restarting on its own. I ran TechTool Pro and it told me that there were some files tat were corrupt, most a black_lock.png file that seem to get repeated in a lot of resource files. I'm just guessing about a font being the problem, but I'd like to be able to run TechTool on the laptop and see if I can fix some of the corrupt files on that machine.

I haven't experienced the kernel panics firsthand. I just get the message that the computers rebooted because there'd been some problem.

I'm also wondering if it might have something to do with solid state drives. The MBP doesn't have an SSD and it has not had any symptoms.

You can Reboot into Safe Boot mode, Shift key at startup till you see the status bar, it will disable all non-Apple fonts, check the HD, load only Apple extensions, and stroke your back.

If that doesn't work, use a bigger hammer. Remove all fonts from HD/Users/You/Library/Fonts, also HD/Library/Fonts. You should only have about 40 or so fonts in HD/System/Library/Fonts. Leave those there or pay the price.

Reboot.

Download FontFinagler and purge all Font caches.

Reboot.

If that all doesn't work it's probably not a font.

Thanks for the orders, Sir! I'll get on it as soon as I can--probably not till next week.