How to set up and use an external mac startup disk apple support. A usable operating system can also reside on a firewire, thunderbolt or usb external drive. How to choose a startup disk on your mac to boot from usb. How to choose a startup disk on your mac to boot from usb ninjastik. Install, boot, and run mac os x from an external hard drive. The process is fairly painless and, if you have a bit of time and patience you.
Jul 25, 2012 for creating a bootable disk with your macs superdrive, the process is even simpler. How to boot mac in internet recovery mode along with the introduction of a locally stored recovery volume, apple introduced its internet recovery service that allows your operating system to download contents of the recovery hard disk partition from the companys service. Note that by default, the mac will start booting up directly to the external hard drive until you change it. After the usb flash drive is inserted into the usb port, press the power button for your machine or restart if the computer is running. Learn about selecting a startup disk, including what to do if your mac doesnt start up from it. Boot up your mac in recovery or internet recovery mode. In the main window, youll see a pop up menu under select the volume to become the installer.
You can create a bootable installer of the mac operating system to make. Use startup manager or startup disk preferences to select the bootable installer as. The default operating system is the one you want to use when you turn on or restart your mac. One involves choosing a boot disk via a system preferences pane called startup disk, which my colleague jeff recently covered. This tutorial deals with the other method which involves picking a boot disk as your mac is starting up. In order to boot your mac from a disk in the cd dvd drive, youll first want to insert disk into the drive, then you can either shut down the mac, or reboot the mac. When you use startup manager to select a startup disk, your mac starts up from that disk once, then returns to using the. When you use startup disk preferences to select a startup disk, your mac starts up from that disk until you choose a different one. If you have started up your mac in windows using boot camp, you can use the boot camp system tray to switch your startup disk default back to os x.
How to pick a startup disk for your mac at boot time. Any mac with a firewire or thunderbolt port can be started up in target disk mode. Boot mac from usb drive using startup manager step 1. How to fix mac startup problems using recovery mode. How do i boot from mac os install disk on apple community. How to fix a macbook pro that cant mount its startup disk.
Cddvd drives are disappearing from computers, leaving usb storage as the only option when reinstalling an operating system. How to boot a mac from usb drive with pictures wikihow. Insert the bootable usb installer drive and go to apple menu restart. Choose this option, identify your backup disk, pick an earlier state from the list, and follow the prompts to restore it from your startup disk. Your mac will now always boot into the selected startup disk until you change it in system preferences, or temporarily override it through. Turn on your mac or restart your mac if its already on. Disk drill is by far the most convenient and uptodate macos bootable file rescue solution.
How to fix a mac or macbook that wont turn on or boot up. How to start up your mac from a bootable cddvd, usb thumb. At the mac os x utilities screen, select disk utility select the boot volume or partition from the left menu and click on the repair tab. Confirm the bios boot sequence lists the usb drive first, or make that change as needed. If youre oldschool and your mac has an optical drive connected to it, you can insert a disc containing an installer for macos, linux, windows or other supported operating system and boot directly into the installer via startup manager. Apr 06, 2020 by default, your mac starts up from its builtin hard disk, but a startup disk can be any storage device that contains an operating system compatible with your mac. How to create a bootable macos mojave installer drive. Select the name of the drive youre using from the dropdown menu next to drive. Maybe you want to troubleshoot some problems, repair the disk, do partitions, format the entire disk, update, and install os x etc. Even so, its still easy to create a usb installation disk for os x lion if you want to install lion on a freshly formatted hard drive, if youre in an emergency booting situation, or if you need to repair your mac s hard drive. Open your macs optical drive by pressing the eject key on your keyboard or holding down the f12 key until the drawer opens. Open the system preferences application in the dock. How to pick a startup disk for your mac at boot time idownloadblog. When you use startup disk preferences to set mac boot from an external drive, so itll boot from that disk until you choose a different one.
Click on create a system repair disc in the left pane of the backup and restore window. When your mac turns on, it loads the operating system on the designated startup disk, a hard disk or partition containing the mac os x. Itll boot into recovery mode, and you can click disk utility to open it up. To boot your mac from a dvdrom installation disc, follow these steps. I had deleted my bootcamp partition before i reset my startup disk to my the one for mac os. Clone your mac boot drive to an external drive 12 steps. If disk utility wasnt able to fix all your problems, you could try running it again. Start up your mac normally, connect the external drive. Jul 31, 2018 the machine will start to boot from the usb drive. Wait while disk uitlity creates the partition and sets up the drive this can.
On computer start up, i get the no bootable device insert boot disk and press any key message. Sep 14, 2015 how to start up your mac from an external usb storage device if your usb thumb drive, usbbased external disk or flash storage contains a usable operating system or an os x installer, you can select it at boot time using os xs builtin feature called startup manager, which can be invoked via a simple keystroke. How to start up your mac from a bootable cddvd, usb thumb drive. All these are executed perfectly when you use an external boot volume to boot up your mac. At the end of this article, ill show you how to boot up to the external hard drive, so skip down if you ended up using the app store method. After starting up from macos recovery, select from these utilities, then click continue.
And to function as a startup disk, it needs to be using a guid partition map. Jun 22, 20 this option on boot trick works for quite literally any boot volume, whether its an external usb drive of any sort, a thunderbolt hard drive, boot dvd, cd, the recovery partition, even in dualboot environments with other versions of os x, or a linux or a windows partition with boot camp, if its bootable and connected to the mac it will be visible at this boot manager. Attach your bootable os x recovery disk to your mac and select it from the prompt list. Start up from a netboot server, if your mac supports network startup volumes.
In windows, click in the right side of the taskbar, click the boot camp icon, then choose boot camp control panel. You can hold down the c key on your keyboard to instantly boot to a mac os x or other bootable disc in your mac. From the menu that appears, choose restart in os x. All the keyboard shortcuts you can use when starting up your mac. In most cases, mounting is an automatic process that happens as soon as the hard drive is connected to a mac or macbook pro. How to select a different startup disk apple support. Media eject, f12, mouse button or trackpad button macos startup volume. In a non emergency controlled situation when your mac is able to be booted normally from its internal drive you can select to boot from the external drive. How to use os x boot options to troubleshoot your mac. We recommend backing up your mac if youre not already doing it and replacing the disk. Press and hold the option key immediately after you see the apple logo.
Insert the mac os install disk and then go to apple system preferences startup disk and choose the desired disk and click restart. To use the default boot image on the server, hold down optionn instead. All the keyboard shortcuts you can use when starting up. Use startup manager or startup disk preferences to select the bootable installer as the startup disk, then start up from it. Use disk utility to restore mac from recovery mode when macos high sierra wont boot. When your mac restarts, press and hold the option key till startup manager opens. When at the initial recovery mode screen, select the disk utility option. As you can see, there are plenty of methods you can use to boot mac into recovery mode. Press the power button to turn on your mac or restart your mac if its already on. How to create a bootable macos high sierra installer drive. Mar 29, 2019 click on system and maintenance, and select backup and restore. In the main window, youll see a popup menu under select the volume to become the installer.
The startup manager scans and lists the drives that are connected and bootable. Apple menu and choose startup disk select the newly connected boot volume from the list, then choose restart or reboot the mac as normal to start from that disk. I have tried suggests like hold down the option key during start up, and hold down commandr during start up. Disk drill 3 is now capable of creating your own bootable mac os x usb drives for data recovery. We officially recommend running data recovery on your startup disk only when your mac is booted from a different drive, using external. I am able to boot into safe mode by holding shift only works like 10% of the time and verified permissions. Your mac will launch into recovery mode and you can start fixing your mac. Whether youre starting up your macintosh computer from its internal hard drive, an operating system installation. How to create a bootable installer for macos use the bootable installer connect the bootable installer to a compatible mac.
A mac cant boot from a mbr disk and needs a gpt partition scheme to be able to boot from. You may get a sad mac face, an audible beep, or another ailment keeping your mac from properly booting. How to make a bootable macos installer on an external drive. How to format a startup drive for a mac if you want to format a drive that will be used as your macs startup disk, the procedure is a little different from formatting it for use as a secondary.
Its like safe mode on windows it wont load thirdparty hardware drivers or startup programs, so you can use this mode to fix problems if your mac isnt working or booting properly. Run disk utility first aid to verify the startup disk s integrity. Apple startup disk for mac free download and software. X will start up your mac from an macos startup volume when itd otherwise boot from a nonmacos volume, like a windows partition prevent login items from opening. Getting your mac to load from a usb drive is fairly straightforward. Starting with os x lion, apple did away with dvds and other media as a method of installing software and switched to a download model instead. Jun 20, 2015 you can permanently change your startup disk or temporarily change your startup disk on your mac.
When you boot in safe mode, your mac will check its startup volume, only load necessary kernel extensions, and disable thirdparty fonts and startup options. Target disk files allows you to share files between two macs that are connected via firewire, thunderbolt 2, usbc, or thunderbolt 3. Most people are content with booting their mac straight into macos, but certain multiboot situations warrant choosing a different startup disk. Jun 01, 2017 when you boot in safe mode, your mac will check its startup volume, only load necessary kernel extensions, and disable thirdparty fonts and startup options. Attach the boot drive to the mac open system preferences from the. One mac basically shows up as an external disk on the other mac, so you can browse and copy files over like you would from a hard drive.
How to select your startup disk and start from it in macos high sierra. First, lets find out if the problem is that your mac wont start up, or that it wont turn on those might sound like the same thing, but theres actually a big. Aug 24, 2015 there are two ways to choosing a startup disk. In windows, click the boot camp icon in the system tray. This symbol at boot means the system has found a bootable installation of mac os x on the system, but there is. Be sure the disc to boot from is actually bootable, most system restore and installation discs are. I successfully turned on bitlocker on my windows 10 pro boot camp partition, and got it to successfully boot in both vmware fusion and on bare metal, with the caveat that setting default boot to mac os would disable booting from windows. Chances are, the mac with the disk, where the data was lost, will be able to start from the boot drive created.
Troubleshoot your mac with these hidden startup options. Startup is complete when you see the utilities window. Insert the mac os x install dvd into the dvd drive. Start up your mac in windows or macos with boot camp. There is no need to panic when you find yourself in trouble just choose and master the method. Aside from using the builtin startup manager, you can also boot into verbose, safe, and target disk modes. Mar 30, 2020 starting with os x lion, apple did away with dvds and other media as a method of installing software and switched to a download model instead. This works for usb drives including the ninjastik for 2018 to 2020 macs with the secure boot t2 chip, see the 2020 macbook pro boot from usb instructions. Once the computer is in target disk mode and available as an external volume to the host mac, you can copy files to or from that volume. In recovery mode, macos runs a special sort of recovery environment. You set your mac or macbook which disk to start up from when more than one startup disk is connected. How to boot a mac from an external drive or alternate startup. You can set the default operating system to either macos or windows.
Start up the mac, holding down the optionalt key while it is booting up. In this article, we are here with the detailed step by step guide on how to boot mac from external hard drive easily. You can image an active boot drive, but try to stop or quit any services and applications to make sure there is minimal writing to the hard drive while the image is being created. You can also change what your mac does by holding down the following keys or key combinations during startup. For creating a bootable disk with your mac s superdrive, the process is even simpler. Click disk utility option click first aid and try repairing mac s disk. How to fix mac bootup problems in recovery mode techradar. How to use your macs disk utility to partition, wipe, repair.
There are times when your mac may misbehave and refuse to boot into os x. Print these boot option keys, because theyre particularly helpful to have. How to create a bootable installer for macos apple support. How to format a startup drive for a mac if you want to format a drive that will be used as your mac s startup disk, the procedure is a little different from formatting it for use as a secondary. Press d during startup apples hardware test utility is usually run by booting. Heres how to make a mac start up disk image using disk utility. Disabled in macos mojave or later, or when using a firmware password. Mar 12, 2020 plug the bootable installer into a compatible mac. Go to apple menu system preference, then click startup disk. In addition to this, macos users also have an option of picking a disk to boot the operating system from. To boot ubuntu from usb media, the process is very similar to the windows instructions above. After setting up boot camp normally, i had to manually edit the hybrid partition map to launch bitlocker. Jan 29, 2010 this symbol at boot means mac os x cannot access critical files on the start up disk.
How to start up your mac in singleuser or verbose mode apple support. Restore your mac from a time machine backup of your mac. Itll make your mac boot from usb in just a few clicks. Mac wont boot from installation disk apple community. You set your mac or macbook which disk to start up from when more than one. Insert a blank cd into the disk drive of your computer. When you hear the startup chime, press and hold the option key. Then again, drive mounting can be performed manually using the disk utility of your machine. Mac wont boot from installation disk after doing a software update, my mac pro got stuck on the gray screen after restart seems like a very common problem recently. A boot disk or a startup disk is a recovery media cd, dvd or floppy disk for older windows versions that you can use to start windows, if it became damaged or corrupted somehow. A mac can start up from any disk that contains a bootable operating system or the files necessary to run your computer while you install an operating system.
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