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MacAuthority CS Blog

Boot Selector: Know Your Options

This is the first post in a short series about what you can do with key combinations during startup. But this won’t be a just long list of every key combination available, we’ll also cover why and how to use them.

Option Boot

Booting while you hold down the option key, often called Option Booting, takes you to the Boot Selector, which looks like the picture below.

Boot Selector

What it Does

The Boot Selector interface displays all of the logical volumes attached to your Mac that have a bootable Operating System installed. If you do this with nothing attached, you’ll only see your internal hard drive. If you have a Boot Camp partition, you will see it as well. If you have a firewire hard drive partitioned with 3 installs of Mac OS X connected to your Mac, they will also appear.

How to Select

From the Boot Selector, you can choose any of the bootable volumes and startup from it rather than your internal hard drive. Use your mouse or arrow keys to select a drive and click the arrow indicator on screen or hit Enter to continue.

When It’s Helpful

While under normal circumstances you can use the Startup Disk preference pane to select another drive to boot from, there are times when that is not possible, or not the fastest way to select an alternate boot volume. Keep in mind that Option Booting only changes your startup disk for that startup, it does not change the startup disk preference.

  • Troubleshooting Startup

    If your Mac won’t boot, for example if it hangs at the Apple Logo with Spinning Gear, then you can’t get to System Preferences to change the startup disk. To run diagnostics on your Mac, you may need to startup from your Mac OS X Install Disc, DiskWarrior Disc, or diagnostic hard drive. Inserting or attaching those discs while Option Booting will allow you choose them to boot from.

  • Cold Startup

    If your Mac is off and you want to boot from an alternate volume, using the Startup Disk preference pane would require you to start your Mac up, insert or connect the volume, select it in System Preferences, and restart. By contrast, if you Option Boot first, you can skip straight to booting from your alternate volume.

  • Booting to or from Bootcamp

    If you are using Bootcamp and want to boot into Windows (or were in Windows and want to boot back into Mac OS X) you can restart and Option Boot to quickly change.

  • Eject a Disc

    If you have a CD or DVD stuck in your Mac, you can sometimes coax it out by Option Booting and using either your Eject Key or F12 key while sitting at the Boot Selector, even if the disc is not a valid startup disc and does not appear on screen.

Option Booting is one of the most useful startup key combinations for anyone supporting Macs in their business or troubleshooting their own Mac, but there are many more and we’ll talk about Shift Booting next week.

Josh Oakes, Corporate Sales & Apple Authorized Technician


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