Booting Your Apple Mac From CD, DVD, iPod or External Device

When you encounter troubles and you want to try and fix them, your first port of call is to reboot your mac from a device other than your internal hard drive. This alternative device could be anything from your CD-ROM, DVD-ROM drive to an external hard drive or even your iPod.

In this article we outline the key combinations, needs and requirements for rebooting your Apple Mac from a secondary device and how to go about troubleshooting your problems. So first, let’s get to grips with how to boot the system from a secondary source:

Booting From your CD/DVD Drive or External Hard Drive

Every new mac comes with a Boot CD or Boot DVD for re-installing the operating system (OS) at some time at which the initial install of the OS has reached its sell-by date. This CD is the easiest way to get the machine booted and in a state where you can run some basic tests and fixes using the Apple Disk Utility available as part of the install process.

I am going to make the assumption that you are unable to boot the Mac to a state where you can reach system preferences, so I will disregard the “Startup Disk” selector in a System Preferences as a means by which to select the CD as a boot disk! As an alternative, startup the Mac, as it whirs into action, slot the CD into the drive and then hold down the C key. This will force the Apple Mac to attempt to find a valid system folder on whatever media is contained int he CD/DVD drive and use it to boot the Mac.

Force Ejecting a CD/DVD from the Mac System

If you need to force the Mac to eject the CD/DVD again, then you can always force reboot or hard reset with the key combination COMMAND + CTRL + POWER BUTTON on a Mac laptop or hold down the power key for 10 seconds to power down the system, before waiting another few seconds and restarting the Mac using the power key again as normal. As the Mac starts up, hold down the mouse or trackpad button and this should force eject the CD. On some system there is a force eject button just inside the lip off the slot.

Booting Your Mac System from, or as, an External FireWire Drive

A faster option and one which provides more options is to boot the system off an external hard drive that might have a backupor a pre-installed mac osx system designed for this purpose. In essence, simply plug in the firewire drive into the Mac and power it up. As you power up the Apple Mac, hold down the OPTION key, this will force the Mac to produce a list of available and valid system boot options, whether the valid system be internal, on CD/DVD or on an external device. From this you can select the correct system folder and then proceed by clicking the rightward arrow.

On the flip side of this, with Apple Mac Systems that can be placed into FireWire mode at startup, you can turn the Apple Mac itself into what for all intent and purpose is an external firewire drive itself. To force the system into FireWire Disk mode, hold down the T key at startup. Once in FireWire Disk mode you should see a FireWire Logo screensaver on the screen. At this point you can plug the system into another Mac for testing the hard drive.

Using Your iPod as an External Boot Device

Recently a number of tools have been put on the market, on both a FREE and commercial basis, which make it easier to turn your iPod into an external utility and boot disk. These include, but are not limited to: SubRosaSoft’s DasBoot (free) and MicroMat’s TechTool Protogo (commercial); so booting your mac and getting fixed seems like it has definitely NEVER been easier.

Setting up your iPod as an external boot device is for another article, but once you have it installed, prepped and ready to go, you can use it much as described in the previous sub-chapter of this article whilst talking about booting from FireWire drives.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 4:48 am and is filed under Apple Mac & OSX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.