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Booting Your Apple Mac & Troubleshooting Startup Problems

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.

What To Do If The Mac Hangs on Startup

At the end of the day, if your Apple Mac system hangs at startup, it could be anything, but in my experience there are usually a number of steps to take, starting with looking at the hard drive and the RAM, that act as a clear step-by-step process of deducation.

To start off I would setup the Mac in FireWire Disk mode or boot if off an external drive containing a valid system. From there I would use a combination of utilities starting with apple's own Disk Utility to check the validity of the file system on the internal hard drive, I would also use this to check and repair any permission, assuming that the first test on the file system comes up ok.

The chances are, if your internal hard drive is just plain fried, or their is an issue with the wires and connectors, that when you boot into the external drive, or from CD/DVD and start using Disk Utility that the drive will not even show up in the list of available devices. To check against this kind of fault you need to take the drive out and test it in and external case, either with the same Macintosh system or another.

When you boot of an external drive and continue to experience operational problems I would start to consider looking internally at the RAM. This is always an easy culprit and can usually fix issues by removing any additional RAM that may have been added on top of the pre-installed configuration. If you have multiple chips you will have to test them by adding them one by one to deduce which, if any, are causing issues.

If whilst having removed the RAM, rebooted using an external device or CD/DVD, you continue to experience issues, then there must be some other more serious issue internally with the Macintosh computer, the kind of issue that is beyond most people tampering, and potentially voiding a warranty. If the computer is within its warranty period and or just past the end of it, I would certainly take it to a Mac store and see what they can do.

Avoiding Trouble with Your Macintosh

Problems are almost inevitable, though they can for the most part be staved off by sensible action, care and caution. For example, if you persistenly have to force reboot after system hangs, this is symptomatic of a larger problem and needs to be dealt with, don't ignore problems, as they they will go away, especially if they are repetitive problems.

Perform regular checks! In the same way you might take yourself to the doctor for annual check ups. It takes nothing of your time, to startup the system off the Boot DVD and to run the various checks and corrections in the Disk Utility provided by Apple. Who knows what it might find, a bad disk catalogue and the possibility of corrupted files might not early on outwardly display itself in the form of a crashing system, and it is always best to try and catch this early. I recently saw a Mac with pitch black screen after startup and which sounded like it was working properly but might have had a faulty screen. The fix? To rebuild the desk using DiskWarrior.

Do clean installs every once in a while. I used to reinstall my Mac every 6 months under Mac OS 9, nowadays I probably havent reinstalled for nearly 12 or 18 months and I have experienced little or no trouble. Having said that, there is nothing liek doing some spring cleaning and getting rid of the junk that is slowing up the computer or causing problems.

Backup! Backup! Backup! You can never stress this enough. Even if you never need it, at least you have the piece of mind. Despite the availability of file recovery software and more, it is MUCH easier to recover data from a backup than it is to try and salvage it from a faulty hard drive with absolutely NO guarantees! And given the cost of drives this day, no one has any excuse, because the cost of any potential loss is FAR higher than the cost of even the most expensive 300GB drive these days.