At some point, you may find a need to boot your Mac from a disc or a drive other than the primary Mac OS X startup volume. Apple made it easy so all you need to know is just a simple keyboard command. Let’s say you need to use the Mac OS X installation disc that came with your computer to reformat the hard drive and put it back to factory settings. Or maybe you’re trying to boot from a on it for troubleshooting purposes. Perhaps you’ve got a cloned backup of your entire Mac on an external hard drive and you want to make sure it’s bootable. Vidio editor for mac.

These are all potential reasons for booting to an external device, among many others. There easiest way to boot to any device other than a Mac’s internal hard drive is to press and hold the Option key immediately after hearing the Mac startup chime.

The MacBook Air SuperDrive has unique firmware which prevents it from being properly recognized as a plug and play optical USB drive by Windows. Fortunately, Apple provides the drivers for running Windows on a Mac, as part of its BootCamp software. Shop for apple airbook at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. Text font free.

Continuing to hold this button down will bring up a menu where you can select a disc or drive to boot from. Use the keyboard arrows to choose your boot device, then press the Enter key.

The computer will start up from the chosen volume, but bear in mind performance will likely be much slower than when you normally operate your Mac. This is especially true of USB flash drives. Rather than hold the Option key, you could instead just press & hold the C key if you’re booting from a CD or DVD disc. This will bypass the selection menu and immediately start from the disc. It won’t work for USB and FireWire drives, though.

Booting to another volume using either of these methods is a one-time temporary change, so you don’t have to worry about altering any settings to reverse it. Your Mac will go back to booting to it’s primary startup disk next time you reboot. My old mac booted from a 1TB Newertech MiniStack via Firewire 800.

It was much faster than the 5400 speed 2.5″ internal drive in the mac mini. Recently, I got a new iMac with 3TB fusion drive. I did a nice clean install and didn’t bother to import my old settings, preferences, software.

But there are things I would like to do with my old lion drive. Unfortunately, even though it seems to be available in target disk mode, the system won’t boot. On the new mac there is no firewire so I had to hook it up with USB 2. I suppose there could be 2 problems 1. It can’t boot from USB 2 2. It can’t boot since the OS was installed on the mini and not from the iMac.

I hope it is the latter. I am getting another 3 TB drive to mirror my 3 TB fusion drive so that I have a bootable copy of my current setup so if something goes wrong I can plug in and go. I would like to boot from USB3 if possible. I am not sure that the Mac can boot from USB3 and fear that I may have to boot from firewire which means buying an adapter that converts from thunderbolt to firewire. Same here secondary drive won’t boot. Bought my first Intel iMac from a friend used 10.6.3 Installer DVD to wipe the drive, create 2 partitions, & install 10.6.3 on both partitions. (aka “2 HDs”) Used Apple’s 10.6.8 Combo upgrader to raise both HDs to 10.6.8.

Installer & Upgrader both reported successful installation on both HDs. Startup Disc shows both HDs which usually means both are bootable & at that point I can choose either one. This has always been my method, from System 6 thru OSX 10.5.8, so that I have a B/U “Disc Tools” HD onboard if my main drive develops problems.

It has always worked like a charm until now. Loaded all my goodies onto the bigger HD & went to work. Now I find my B/U boot drive won’t boot it hangs at grey screen. Tried Safe Mode, same result. Disk Utility reports the drive is OK.

Why is this method not working? – OR – Why does it work for some but not for others? Why are these questions going unanswered? Installing El Capitan on a second hand Mac mini. Can only download the installer app on a current Mac from the Mac App Store app. Download the 6Gb installer and burn to USB flash as described elsewhere.