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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
Key Combination Purpose
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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Key Combination Purpose
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
Key Combination Purpose
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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