Welcome To My Mind

Most people who are new to the Mac (and perhaps even those who’ve been around a while, depending on their personal level of Mac geekery) might not be aware of all the boot options available to you after pressing the power button on your computer. Not only can you boot from the internal drive, as is most typical of any computer out there in Mac Land, but you can boot from any number of other devices/media as well. I’m going to cover all of those options here… or at least the ones I’m aware of. My goal was to make this list as complete as possible, but if I’ve overlooked sokmthing, feel free to send me an email with corrections and/or additions and I will gladly include them here!

 I was going to list the options in the order I’ve most used them, but figured that might be confusing. So here they are in alphabetical order. That makes sense, right? :)

All you need to do to get the Mac to boot in these various configurations is press and hold the designated key on your keyboard right after you power the machine on. I’m no expert on this topic, so can’t say with absolute authority how long you need to hold the key down while booting, but I’ve found it works well to hold it down until you see the apple pictured in the center of the screen. This happens a few seconds after you hear the startup sound.

• C - This option will make the Mac boot from the CD/DVD drive. Obviously you’re going to want to make sure you’ve got a bootable CD/DVD in the drive beforehand or your Mac will assume you’re an idiot and continue to boot to the internal hard drive like it’s used to doing.
• D - If you have multiple hard drives installed, this option will force your Mac to boot from the first internal hard drive.
• N - This option is called “Netboot”, and as you can probably guess, it’s capable of booting from the network. More specifically it searches for and boots from a TFTP or BOOTP server located on your network.
• R - Pressing this key while booting will force a PowerBook to reset its screen to its default size. This might be useful if you’ve been using an external monitor.
• T - This is one of the coolest boot features in my personal opinion. I guess it’s because it’s saved my ass so many times when I needed to get data pulled off of a failed machine. It boots the machine into Target Disk Mode. To get this to work, simply plug the Mac you’re planning on booting into Target Disk Mode into another Mac using a FireWire cable (it’s important to note that FireWire is the only supported connection type. USB, for instance, will not work), and that machines internal hard drive will be available to you as an drive on the connected machine. How cool is that? It makes it really convenient to save data from otherwise screwed up systems. Remember this option, because it will save your life one day.
• Option key - Hold this key down on newer Macs to get to the System Picker. This is a graphical listing of devices that are available on the system to boot from. All you need to do is click on the device you wish to boot from.
• Command + S - This option will boot OS X into Single User Mode, which is a useful mode to address any issues you’re having with the operating system. Think of it as a form of “safe mode” for OS X, if you will. It’s not exactly the same thing, but you get the idea.
• Command + V - This option will boot OS X into Verbose Mode, which does just what you think it does. The system will report any and all console messages generated during the OS X boot process. Only use this is you aren’t afraid of the complexities of UNIX.
• Mouse button - Hold your mouse button down during the boot process and it will eject any removable media, such as CDs, DVDs, and external drives.

As I said earlier, this list is probably lacking something. I am pretty handy with a Mac, but by no means an expert. So, if you see something you know, and that I’ve clearly missed… by all means contact me using the contact form on this site and I will happily add it to the list. The same goes for any functions I may have made a mistake on. Although I doubt I’ve made any technical mistakes here, let me know if I’ve screwed up and I’ll fix it right up! I promise!

Until next time, my friends!