All articles and posts are written by Tim Verpoorten (Surfbits) unless otherwise noted in the beginning of the article itself.
Inevitably, you may one day find yourself having to do something on your Mac that falls outside the comfortable graphical user interface where you spend your days. The fact that your Mac is a full blown Unix system beneath the covers means one of two things to you: a) absolutely nothing or b) the coolest thing since double sided 5 1/4″ floppy disks but for most of you, the answer will certainly be ‘A’.
Regardless, it’s a good to have some idea of just what your Mac can do at boot up, with two of the more common tasks being Target Disk Mode and Eject any Media for stuck CDs and DVDs. Below is a listing of many of the boot command keys and what you can make your Mac do by using these while booting. Just today I helped a friend get a stuck CD out of his Powerbook by simply holding down the mouse button while booting so I thought I’d pass along the list that I use most frequently. If you really want to get your geek on, try holding down Command-V while booting to see what really happens behind the scenes during boot up.
In addition, Apple has a knowledge base article detailing these and other keyboard shortcuts for OSX. Check it out, this article got on Digg.com
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November 10th, 2005 at 9:23 am
i had heard of most of these, but not the mouse click one. does it boot after it ejects the stuff or does it ust eject?
November 10th, 2005 at 9:26 am
thank you, very nice list.
i was unaware of the holding down the mouse button to eject a cd. i’ll have to try this out when i get home.
November 10th, 2005 at 9:38 am
Cool Mac Boot Shortcuts
Inevitably, you may one day find yourself having to do something on your Mac that falls outside the comfortable…
November 10th, 2005 at 9:42 am
[...] Surf-Bits » Betcha Didn’t Know Your Mac Could Do This! [...]
November 10th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Cool list, I’ll be sure to steal my friends Powerbook and give ‘em a try! =)
November 10th, 2005 at 10:43 am
the mouse hint goes back to the days of the Mac Pluses (or at least around that time). Still comes in handy.
November 10th, 2005 at 10:47 am
Bet You Didn’t Know Your Mac Could Do That?
Inevitably, you may one day find yourself having to do something on your Mac that falls outside the comfortable graphical user interface where you spend your days. The fact that your Mac is a full blown Unix system beneath the covers means one of two t…
November 10th, 2005 at 11:14 am
[...] While Apple has done a fantastic job making OS X incredibly user friendly and easy to use, its core is based on a UNIX variant so there are a lot powerful commands you can use if you do a little searching. Even from the boot screen, there are a lot of things you can do by using certain keyboard keys from booting from different mediums (CD, hard drive, or network), ejecting CDs, and more. Surf-Bits has a nice list of boot command keys which you can use to access all these options, some of which might help you troubleshoot your system at some point in the future, so be sure to check it out. While many of you might not care too much about what goes on behind the scenes on your computer as long as it works, having used Linux for many years, I can tell you it will definitely help you resolve problems were they to come up. [...]
November 11th, 2005 at 10:59 am
Um, dunno about other macs, but my PowerMac G5 has a little (like I dunno 20 page??) manual that contains most if not all of these shortcuts. Is it really that bad that people won’t even bother to leaf through the little pamphlet Apple calls a manual these days?
November 12th, 2005 at 5:10 am
[...] Betcha Didn’t Know Your Mac Could Do This… Boot commands. [...]
November 12th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
#6 Yeah, the Mac Plus for sure, and I believe the 512 and 128 K too.
Another intriguing wan happened in the Classic/SE age, when a complete disk was stored in the ROM and reachable with some key combination too, so a diskless boot was possible.
November 17th, 2005 at 11:05 am
Reply to the web-guy.
If you continue to hold down the left (or only) mouse button - nothing more will happen until you let go. This will let you, for example switch disks (removing your audio CD and putting in your DiskWarrier ™ CD, for example). You can then put your finger on the C key, let go of the mouse button and boot from the CD.
November 17th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
The Macintosh Classic could be booted from a ROM image using the command key combo COMMAND-OPTION-X-O. XO was the code name for the Classic. The system version contained in ROM was System 6.0.8, if memory serves me correct.
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d a v e
February 23rd, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Very good site! I like it! Thanks!
February 27th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
I have a mac, that i bout configured such that it boots in the Mac-Boot Screen, i would like it to start up with out it so i can use it as a server. Will Zapping the PRAM remove it? or do i have to go to more drastic measures.
September 1st, 2006 at 7:00 pm
[...] Sweet list of boot command keys. I know this is Digg and on Digg, everybody knows everything and all stories are old news or dupes. There has to be someone who didn’t know these….read more | digg story [...]