Can't get string from Serial Monitor! Please Help!

Thank you very,very much groundFungus! That was very useful !
You're right PaulS, I've asked the wrong question !
So, in this statement: "byte mac[] = {0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED};" how can an array of bytes
hold these hex values? And more important,if I got from Serial Monitor a string like:
"0xDE:0xAD:0xBE:0xEF:0xFE:0xED" and I've devided it in 6 substrings like: "0xDE", how do I store those
values in EEPROM, in order to read them back and pass them to Ethernet.begin() ?
Should I remove th "0x" part then split "DE" in 2 different bytes, and write them in EEPROM ?