Boot your Mac from a CD / DVD
Apr 12, 2010 - 9 Comments
You can boot your Mac from a disk in the CD / DVD drive by inserting the disk into the drive and on system boot holding down the C key. Remember that booting from a CD or DVD is significantly slower than booting from a hard disk, so don’t worry if things are taking longer than usual to startup.
If you want to reinstall Mac OS X or run Disk Utility on your main boot drive, you’ll need to do this. Now this isn’t really an advanced tip by any means, but amusingly enough I actually forgot how to do this (I was holding D, oops) and I’m a long time Mac user!
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What if when I try to do this, it asks me for a password I forgot?
Sokoya – in that case, return the mac to the person you stole it from….
I have a older Power MAC G3 here at work. When one guy left he gave to another person here. Now she is gone and everything is password protected. Botting the OS from CD hasn’t prompted me for a password. Thanks for the shortcut. I am not a Apple guy
Thanks , it works with my Macbook Pro but only through software boot, not hardware boot.
Mohammad
I tried it with Disc Warrior and I held it for almost a full 10 minutes and it never booted. Could that mean the version of DW is not compatible or that it really takes that long?
What should I do?
hit the c key on boot . it will load cd.
I want to use CloneZilla to backup a MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo) but when I use the C key to boot from the CD-RW I get the following screen:
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:
And then no response from the keyboard. What’s happening here?
(CloneZilla Live v1.2.12-67)