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.
- C – Boot from CD or DVD drive installed in the computer
- D – Boot from the internal disk drive
- N – Boot from the network server
- R – Resets the display on PowerBooks and iBooks to factory settings
- X – Boot into MacOS X
- Shift-Option-Command-Delete – Ignore the configured boot device setting and scan for an alternate boot device
- T – Put the computer into FireWire target mode so it can be used as a hard drive
- Option – Have Open Firmware run the OS Picker app to choose a disk to boot from
- Shift – Boot into Safe Mode
- Command-V – Perform a verbose boot allowing you to see all the BSD output as the system boots
- Command-S – Perform a boot into single user to peform some sort of system maintenance
- Option-Command-O-F Access Open Firmware directly without booting into an operating system
- Option-Command-P-R – Reset Open Firmware’s NVRAM, also known as "zapping" the PRAM
- Hold down mouse button – Eject any media, such as a CD, in the system’s removable drive
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
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?
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.
Cool Mac Boot Shortcuts
Inevitably, you may one day find yourself having to do something on your Mac that falls outside the comfortable…
[...] Surf-Bits » Betcha Didn’t Know Your Mac Could Do This! [...]
Cool list, I’ll be sure to steal my friends Powerbook and give ‘em a try! =)
the mouse hint goes back to the days of the Mac Pluses (or at least around that time). Still comes in handy.
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…
[...] 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. [...]
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?
[...] Betcha Didn’t Know Your Mac Could Do This… Boot commands. [...]
#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.
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.
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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Very good site! I like it! Thanks!
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.
[...] 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 [...]