We've had some questions recently on
Ask TUAW about boot options so I thought it would make for a good
Mac 101. Obviously, Boot Camp has brought dual-booting to the fore on the Mac platform, but there are actually a variety of boot time options built into your Mac which allow you to interact with it to some degree before loading the OS. The most important of these, of course, is choosing the boot partition and this is easily done by holding down the option (⌥) key after restarting the machine. This will bring up a menu of all bootable volumes (such as a Windows Boot Camp partition), including mounted external USB and FireWire drives as well as optical discs. However, there are more handy shortcuts as well:
- You can force OS X to boot from a mounted optical disc by holding down the C key.
- Holding down the T key will put that Mac into FireWire Target disk mode, which will allow another Mac to access its hard drive over a FireWire cable as if it were an external hard drive.
- Holding down the Shift key will boot into Safe Mode, which can be very useful if your Mac is misbehaving.
Apple has a
nice list of a few more boot time key combos that are worth keeping in mind.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
1-11-2008 @ 8:09AM
adrenalin said...
Cool, I had no idea about the "T" key trick. That is going to come in handy.
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 8:46AM
Luigi193 said...
OMG, its awesome man, you'll love it!!!!!!
Luigi
1-11-2008 @ 9:15AM
chesama said...
since the crappy option key option is slow and painful, waiting for the computer to figure out what partitions you have, there is an applescript/shell script which allows you to choose your boot partition ahead of time, and restarrts into that partition.
this is not mine, i think i got it off of osxhints.com
replace partition1 and partition2 with the names of your partitions - you can add more if you have more...
display dialog "Select a startup disk" buttons ¬
{"partition1", "partition2"}
set bootVol to the button returned of the result as text
do shell script "bless -mount \"/Volumes/" & bootVol & ¬
"\" -setBoot" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 9:50AM
John Coxon said...
Of course, holding the Option Key doesn't seem to work with roughly half of Boot Camp partitions, as far as I can tell from the Mac forums I read. It certainly refuses to work on my MacBook (the one with the X3100, about six weeks old). The best way to boot into Windows is, unfortunately, from OS X, which can be annoying...
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1-11-2008 @ 10:23AM
matthew said...
a great one for you
hold down the menu key on your apple remote on boot up, this does the same as c
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 11:18AM
Jeff said...
I think it may have something to do with the new Apple keyboards.
the Option Key trick always worked for me, until I got the new keyboard.
I assume this is because the keyboard does not turn on until after a partition has been selected.
Does any one know how to fix this??
1-11-2008 @ 10:37AM
benc said...
If you hold down the mouse button while booting, OS X will eject the CD/DVD. Useful if you want to get the disc out ASAP.
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1-11-2008 @ 11:31AM
Dan Parmelee said...
How did you guys get the Windows partition to appear on the left?
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1-11-2008 @ 11:48AM
Don said...
You won't be able to get your bootcamp partition to appear when you reboot with new MacBooks with the Option Key..
You can however select the partition from within OSX tho.. I think under System Preferences --> Startup Disk
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 12:02PM
Richard A. Kronick said...
Have found trying two new wired Apple aluminum keyboards hooked to a Mac Mini that the keyboards are not recognized until the end of the boot up sequence, therefore none of the boot up key combinations work. The only way is to use the remote menu button until Apple gets it's act straight. I have tried to contact Apple to no avail!!
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 1:07PM
james said...
had to safe boot last night. while trying to do the iwow/volume logic leopard hack, i lost my volume control and had no sound out options in my sound prefs. the odd thing is that my 12" pb safe booted into my external drive running 10.4.11. after i rebooted back to my internal 10.5.1 drive my volume prefs showed back up. odd that my pb did that, but thank god for safe boot!
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 3:34PM
Edward Loveall said...
Mat, how did you get the option character to show up on the page? Is there a keyboard shortcut for that? I looked in the page source and didn't see a code for it either...
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 4:04PM
Mat Lu said...
I used the Character Palette (well actually sometime ago I used the Character Palette to out that glyph into Textexpander so that it is inserted whenever I type: OPT).
1-11-2008 @ 4:19PM
geekazine said...
Kewl. It's been a while since I ran the key commands and was looking for my cheat sheets. Now I have it. ;)
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 6:46PM
ad7am said...
How about Mac 101 articles on FTP and BitTorrent? Or would those be Mac 201? Thanks in advance.
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 9:55PM
HandyMac said...
"You can force OS X to boot from a mounted optical disc by holding down the C key."
Uh, not exactly, since the optical disc isn't mounted until startup is complete. And in fact most bootable optical discs (such as OS X Install discs) never mount, since they don't display a desktop; they just startup the computer and go directly into the Installer or other application (e.g. DiskWarrior on the DW CD).
You can turn on a Mac, quickly slip in a CD or DVD, then press the C key to get it to start from that disc.
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 10:43PM
ZeroCorpse said...
Coolest thing my MacBook has done this week:
I put in a new, bigger hard drive, and in doing so I cloned my old one on to a USB drive, intending to migrate all my stuff back to the new drive once I'd installed OS X.
You see, I didn't know the Mac could do what it did.
I turn on the Mac with the new (blank, unformatted, unpartitioned) hard drive in it, and before I knew what was happening it booted to the USB drive with my clone info on it.
I had no idea Macs could boot from USB drives. I knew firewire was OK, but USB?
So up comes my system, exactly as it had always been, and I'm able to use disk utility to partition the new drive, and then Carbon Copy Cloner to copy over my system. (Super Duper!, which I purchased, is still not Leopard compatible. Wah!)
No problems. Back in business in no time at all. Migration Assistant would have taken HOURS, but this was fast and simple.
So I salute you, Mac OS X Leopard, for being able to boot from a USB start disk. It blew my mind that something that was so OBVIOUS and CONVENIENT was so damn natural to my favorite OS.
Things like this make me loathe Windows and cringe whenever I have to deal with it, anymore. It's like going from sitting in a restaurant ordering steak, to being plopped in the jungle without weapons and having to make weapons before I can even kill the animal and eat it raw.
Windows is raw meat stabbed to death with a sharpened stick compared to OS X.
Reply
1-11-2008 @ 10:58PM
ZeroCorpse said...
I should clarify that I was attempting to boot to the OS X install DVD, but was too late with my keystroke, and thus it just went ahead and found the only usable OS X system on my computer-- the USB drive.
Cool. I love the Mac.
1-12-2008 @ 3:03AM
Hunter said...
Guys, this app called rEFIt adds an automatic bootscreen to the startup, so you dont have to hold down any special keys to start it up. Get it here, I couldn't use bootcamp without it.
http://refit.sourceforge.net/
Image: http://refit.sourceforge.net/img/screen2.png
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1-12-2008 @ 9:29PM
matt said...
Anyone found a simple way to get the Mac OS boot manager to always appear? Other than using rEFIt or BootPicker?
Something with nvram boot-args perhaps? To simulate the Option-Key down...
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