OS X: Ten Boot Options for Leopard

Contributor Icon Contributed by davak Date Icon March 11, 2008  
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

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  • adam
    Thanks a bunch
  • MacPro user
    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.
  • flattdobbs
    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)
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