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A Guide to Startup Key Combinations in Mac OS X

by Matt

Your Mac has many secret abilities when you first turn your computer on, and you may have already discovered one or two of these, especially ifyouve ever had to troubleshoot startup problems. This article is a simple list of the startup commands Ive used over the years. Hopefully it will serve

as a quick guide for you. To perform a startup key combination, you simply hold down the keyboard key(s) corresponding to the appropriate purposewhen you turn on your Mac. In an ideal world, you hold the keys down while pressing the power button, but some tricky combinations likely requireyou to press the power button and then very quickly hold down the keys on the keyboard (before the startup sound finishes playing). As you alreadyknow, the normal boot sequence is: black screen > gray screen > gray screen with Apple logo > gray screen with Apple logo and spinning gear >desktop. You should continue holding down these keys until either the gray screen switches to something other than the Apple logo, or if yourcommand needs to boot the computer, hold them down until the Apple logo appears with the spinning gear. Lastly, remember that resettingPRAM/NVRAM will restart your computer, so once your computer reboots while you hold down the Command-Option-P-R keys, you can let go.Hope this helps!

Key Combinations for Booting from Various Disks

Key Combination Purpose

C Start up from a bootable CD/DVD (in the drive)

N Boot from a NetBoot server

Command-R Boot from Recovery Petition (Lion only)

Option Start the Startup Manager, which lets you choose to boot from any bootable source

Delete-Option-Command-Shift(DOCS)

Skip booting from the default boot disk and instead look for any other available boot disk

Key Combinations for Troubleshooting Hardware Problems


DIntel Macs: Boot from the Apple Hardware Test partition on the appropriate DVD (PowerPC users must hold downOption and boot to the Startup Manager to run the Apple Hardware Test)

Command-Option-P-R Resets the NVRAM/PRAM

Command-Option-O-F PowerPC Macs: Boot to Open Firmware (command line)

Key Combinations for Troubleshooting Operating System Problems
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Shift Mac OS X starts in safe mode

Command-S Mac OS X starts in single-user mode

Command-V Mac OS X starts in verbose mode

Miscellaneous Key Combinations


T Put the Mac into target disk mode, which allows other Macs to access your internal hard drives via FireWire orThunderbolt

6-4Allows compatible Macs to boot with the 64-bit kernel if they normally boot from the 32-bit kernel (Snow Leopardonly)

Eject/F12/mouse or trackpadbutton held down

Eject a CD/DVD currently in the drive

Are there any key commands missing from this list? What tricks do you have at startup? Let others know in the comments.

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