The Mac Admin's Blog

Few special key commands while start up. This can be of great use while troubleshooting start up issues in Mac. Action/Explanation Keystroke Eject CD on boot Hold Mouse button down immediately after powering on OS X Safe boot Press Shift during startup Start up in FireWire Target Disk mode Press T during startup Startup from a CD Press C during startup Bypass primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume Press Cmd-Opt-Shift-Delete during startup Choose Startup disk before booting Press Option during startup Start up in Verbose mode Press Cmd-V during startup Start up in Single-User mode (command line) Press Cmd-S during startup Force Powerbook screen reset Press R during startup Force OS X startup Press X during startup

For all OSX & OSX Servers Starting a Mac machine in Verbose or Single user mode is generally user for troubleshooting and Software Development. I am publishing a seperate article on this because in many of the troubeshooting steps that I have asked you to start your Mac in Verbose mode or single user mode in my last articles. Process to start in these modes: You need to shut down the machine, for new users I would like to add that you if in case you need to do a hard reboot of your machine, please keep the power button pressed for more that six seconds, reason being Mac goes in sleep mode if you press the power button for 3 seconds and you will never know if your Mac is completely turned off is just sleeping. After starting the machine, press Apple key and one of the v/s keys in combination. Here ' v' will take you to Verbose mode and ' s' will take you to Single user mode. To Exit from Verbose and Single user mode: You need to type reboot while exiting from Sing

PROBLEM IN TURNING THE MACHINE UP (for 10.3 and older only) The worst thing you could ever experience in a computer is not turning up. No matter how many times you do a hard boot but the result is same. If the machine is Mac, there could be variations in error notification. Most of the time it is a simple issue that you could fix after going through this article. IDENTIFYING THE SYMPTOMS There can be empty blue screen with a spinning wheel (the progress indicator in Mac). A " Prohibitory sign " appears or " Kernel panic error " is mentioned on the screen. Blank gray screen without any text could appear. No notification , but machine doesn't turns up. There can be empty blue screen with a spinning wheel (the progress indicator in Mac). I am mentioning 5 simple steps that you can try and hope it will work for you, but if in any case it doesn't works then try the last few steps that are slightly critical but I know you will easily do it because you can't