OS X: Ten Boot Options for Leopard

Contributor Icon Contributed by David Kirk     
Tag Icon Tagged: Mac OS X Leopard  

Multiple shortcuts exist for the various methods of booting Leopard. These ten boot options range from essential debugging tips such as verbose and safe modes to dual booting options.


To use these boot shortcuts or commands, hold down the bolded keypress while your system is booting up. If it does not work, you probably did not start holding down the key (or key combination) soon enough.

shift – Safe Mode

Booting with the shift key depressed starts OS X in Safe Mode with Account preferences ignored and unessential kernal extensions / kexts disabled.

option – Startup Manager

Booting with the option key depressed starts OS X with the Startup Manager which allows the user to select which OS or partition from which to boot.

Mouse button – Eject Media

When the user boots with the mouse key depressed, any media in the drive such as a DVD or CD is ejected.

cmd v – Verbose Boot

If this key command is held down when booting, all the startup messages that are typically hidden will be displayed. This is an excellent method for debugging booting issues.

c – Boot from CD/DVD

Booting with the “C” key held will tell the system to boot directly from a CD/DVD in the drive.

t – Target Mode

If the “T” key is held during the bootup, the computer will be placed in target mode. This basically allows the computer to be accessed by other systems as a FireWire drive. Other computers can read, write, or mount the target mode system just like any other FireWire drive.

Other Bootup Shortcuts —

cmd s – Single User Mode

x – OS X Force boot

r – PowerBook Display Reset

n – Boot up from NetBoot Server

 

13 Comments -


  1. adam said on October 19, 2008

    Thanks a bunch

  2. MacPro user said on June 7, 2009

    Holding the Option key while booting will display all bootable drives connected to the machine. This is for intel based macs. In OSX, you can clone backups and boot to a drive if you have say a laptop hard drive failure. A mac tech support person told me superduper! is a good app for making these bootable clones as a backup strategy. Works great and has saved me more than once while I waited for the best time for getting my crashed drive replaced.

  3. Anonymous said on August 7, 2009

    Actually the Option key at boot time has been around since at least 10.2 (I didn’t use 10.1 so I’m not sure on that) so it works with PPC machines and as far as I know it is not hardware related at all but an OS thing.
    Also I would recommend Carbon Copy Cloner for duplicating drives (bootable or otherwise). Mike Bombich is awesome with much detailed advice for cloning and network booting etc…. I’ve never used SuperDuper! but I think that Mike B really knows his stuff, it’s freeware with a suggested donation but not necessary for the app to work. Check out his website. (I’m not affiliated at all just a fan)

  4. Anonymous said on December 30, 2009

    “x – OS X Force boot” doesn’t work. :(

  5. Anonymous said on December 30, 2009

    x – OS X Force boot doesn’t seem to work.

  6. Anonymous said on May 18, 2010

    THANK YOU SO MUCH :)

  7. Eric Phillips said on June 4, 2010

    How do you bypass user log-in password? I tried cmd-s with no luck.I have no cd as I am doing this for a friend.I have also tried shift.The pc has what looks like multi-person log ins.

  8. Nospam said on August 20, 2010

    You might want to indicate which boot options (such as safe mode and single-user mode) are disabled if a firmware password has been set.

  9. Norbort said on November 7, 2010

    Thanks a lot for posting this. I’m working on a very elaborate way to play minecraft and would have been very disapointed if I couldn’t boot from optional drives

  10. Rogerwinterton said on June 30, 2011

    i cannot alter my startup disc.  i now appear to be running from a clone disc
    (even apps) not sure how this has happened.  I have tried altering the startup disc
    back to mac hd in preferences but this doesn’t work.  is there a way to force the
    system back to the mac hd volume permanently.
    many thanks
    roger

  11. Jamil-reallove said on August 19, 2011

    the problem is when i decide to boot from any Mac dvd it shows the mac installation screen for a second then the computer restart 
    plz help!!

  12. Pete said on September 1, 2011

    When I press the S button the loading bar comes up, loads for a while then goes off. The screen then gets stuck on the grey page with apple logo

    Please someone help.

  13. OSX Boot Options said on September 29, 2011

    Thanks for the great tutorial. Came in handy for installing Lion!

 

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