Boot Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

How to burn a Lion boot disc

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 7th, 2011)

Mac OS X Lion will debut in July, and this handy set of instructions from Egg Freckles will let you create a boot disc for installation. OS X Lion will be distributed via the Mac App Store, and you can download the installer files to your hard drive. Once you have the installer files, follow ...

Mac 101: What's happening when your Mac is starting up?

by Steven Sande (Oct 22nd, 2010)

Recently, in the interest of sleeping soundly through the night, I've been turning off my 27" iMac every night. No, I'm not doing this for energy conservation, but the darned thing used to light up at random intervals in the middle of the night. Since I now have to power up the iMac every morning, I ...

A weekend with FireWire

by Sang Tang (Aug 7th, 2009)

My MacBook Pro and I had a bit of a rendezvous this past weekend. She's a 15 inch Core Duo with 2GB of RAM. Although she'll occasionally get as hot as a toaster oven (leaving red marks on my lap at times) and mooed like a cow when we first met, she's been a consistent workhorse for me. But her hard ...

Found Footage: a Mac Classic booting

by David Chartier (Sep 3rd, 2006)

The Mac Classic was an early 90's 'budget' Mac running System 6 (check out Low End Mac's history and profile of this model), and I've personally never seem one in action. Since pictures are worth only so many words, I thought I'd post a YouTube video I stumbled across of a Classic starting up. The ...

A simpler process for creating a bootable PPC and Intel drive

by David Chartier (Jun 20th, 2006)

A reader of macosxhints.com has posted another method for creating a bootable drive that is friendly to both PowerPC and Intel Macs. While it's a twelve-step process, macosxhints.com has called it 'simpler', so who are we to argue? If you've been hankering for a way to create a bootable drive that ...

AppleScripts to set startup disk between Windows and Mac OS X

by David Chartier (Jun 19th, 2006)

If you're living in a Boot Camp world and have a need for changing your startup disk from time to time, enterprising TUAW reader David B. has written a couple of AppleScript apps with your name on them. Boot (Camp) Sargent beta 0.1 is actually two scripts: the first to set your startup disk to ...

An easier method to get Windows Vista to run with Boot Camp

by David Chartier (Jun 8th, 2006)

Yes, before you fire off a flaming comment, we know this is The Unofficial Apple Weblog, but we thought it might be nice to post a tip for those of you who either want or need to play with the next generation of Microsoft Windows, reportedly due out within the decade (hey, it was originally due in ...

Triple boot your MacBook Pro

by David Chartier (Apr 16th, 2006)

Booting only two OSs on your MacBook Pro is, like, totally so last week. Aside from earlier reports, it apparently is possible to bring a third OS to the party, as OnMac.net has posted a how-to wiki for booting WinXP, Mac OS X and Linux on a MacBook Pro via Boot Camp (so far, this is untested on ...

This just in: OS X running on PCs a bad idea, or: C.K.'s lost it

by David Chartier (Apr 5th, 2006)

Who could've imagined that hell would freeze over and C.K. would lose it all in the same day? Check out his It's on! post. Did you notice his "Of course, the real key to this would be if Apple would just go ahead and release a version of OS X for PCs" line towards the end? Granted we're ...

Universal OS X, NetBoot OS X, courtesy of MacOSXHints

by David Chartier (Mar 31st, 2006)

Of all the people who could create a Universal OS X boot disk (*cough* Apple *cough*), is anyone surprised that MacOSXHints (as far as I know) got there first? Top it off with the fact that they also created a NetBoot image and, well... now they're just making everyone else look bad (*cough!*). This ...

TUAW Tip: keyboard shortcuts during Mac OS X startup

by David Chartier (Mar 27th, 2006)

For today's TUAW Tip, I thought I'd cover some of the basic essentials for starting up your Mac, especially for recent switchers who feel naked and lost without their BIOS. I compiled the list I have here from Magical Macintosh Key Sequences (which Dave mentioned last September), Apple's ...

Boot a PowerPC Mac from a USB2 drive

by Dan Pourhadi (Mar 7th, 2006)

We all know that the Intel Macs can easily boot from USB drives, but that was never really a viable option on the PowerPC machines. At least, that's what most of us assumed. Mac OSX Hints jumps on Yet Another Opportunity To Prove Me Wrong, this time posting a step-by-step guide to booting your ...

Boot Intel Macs from iPods

by David Chartier (Feb 27th, 2006)

We've already discovered that Intel Macs can boot from USB drives, but MacOSXHints has devised a way of booting these fancy new Macs from a USB iPod, without having to partition it or ruin its ability to play music and videos. There are a few steps involved, so check out their play-by-play for the ...

Intel Macs can boot from USB drives

by David Chartier (Feb 8th, 2006)

Last week Dan posted about the new complications of Intel OS X drives not being bootable on PowerPC Macs, and vice-versa. The report came from Jon 'Wolf' Rentzsch, who recently updated the originating post with some specifics about booting and partition schemes, with one fairly positive detail: ...

Video race between iMac G5 and Core Duo iMac booting

by C.K. Sample, III (Jan 17th, 2006)

I found this cool video on YouTube via Digg this morning. They simultaneously boot an iMac G5 and a new Core Duo iMac to see which is faster at booting. The Core Duo, of course, leaves the G5 flailing in the dust, but I, along with many of the commenters on Digg, am suspicious of the state of that ...