Mac|Life

Startup Manager

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If you’re not sure what your Mac is trying to start up from, hold Opt after you power it on. Startup Manager offers an explicit choice of startup disks, plus ‘EFI Boot’, which is a Recovery system stored on your Time Machine backup drive. In Recovery, go to Startup Disk from the Apple Menu, pick a system, then restart. >>> Reinstall macOS This Recovery option isn’t as nuclear as it sounds: it reinstalls macOS (the version you get depends on the shortcut you used to enter Recovery — see bit.ly/rcvsteps) without removing your files. But to start afresh, or if your startup disk has as yet unfixed problems, use Disk Utlity to erase it first, but note that this can’t be undone. >>> Recovery utilities Unlike safe mode, Recovery doesn’t give you Finder access to files, but there’s an extra tool that’s only found here, under Utilities in the menu bar. Firmware Password Utility (or Startup Security Utility) lets you create a password for extra security at startup (see bit.ly/fwpass). Network Utility and Terminal are the same as in macOS itself. >>> Apple Diagnostic­s Mac having hardware issues? Use its built–in diagnostic­s to check. Shut it down and disconnect everything except power, mouse, keyboard, display, and network. Power on and hold D until you see a language selection screen. Apple Diagnostic­s takes a few minutes to test for issues. See ‘Learn more’ at bit.ly/appldiag for extra tips. >>> Check your startup disk Disk Utility can’t carry out repairs on your startup disk while you’re in macOS proper, but it can if you start up from the macOS Recovery partition or from Internet Recovery. Recovery is also handy if you’ve erased your startup disk (after backing everything up) to create a fresh system and now have no macOS. Start in it and pick ‘Reinstall macOS’.

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