Change the Mac Startup Drive on Boot

Mar 22, 2011 - 4 Comments

change-boot-drive-startup-mac

A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, this will bring up the boot drive manager. Selecting a boot drive from this menu will not change your default drive, this is a one-time only choice of which drive to start from.

I use this to change my boot OS from Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.7, but I set my default startup drive to 10.6 for stability reasons. You can read how I setup a dual boot Lion & Snow Leopard installation for more on this.

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Posted by: AJ in Mac OS X, Tips & Tricks

4 Comments

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  1. Ian says:

    I didn’t know the MacBook Air had a Recovery HD partition, I thought you only needed the USB key?

  2. albinoz says:

    Yes the new MacBookAir have an USB Key verry nice. But I dont see recovery Disk, I know this will include with Lion.

    PS: atl at boot is not a Tips and Tricks but a feature… :/

  3. Parakeet says:

    You can also set the startup drive in System Preferences > Startup Disk

    You can switch it around any time but what you leave it set on becomes the default boot disk.

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