IMac always tries to boot from CD

Hi,
i installed Windows XP using BootCamp and since then the system always tries to boot from a CD. Now I have to hold down COMMAND while starting the computer to choose the harddrive.
How can I make the system boot from the harddrive automatically?
Thanks

Hold down on the option key on restart.
Choose the mac os x volume icon and then click on the straight arrow.
Once booted into Leopard select system preferences from the apple menu.
Choose Startup Disk and set the volume you want to boot to on startup.
The option key allows you to boot to any volume without changing the default setting.
The Startup Disk preference allows you to set the default startup volume.

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Computer tries to boot from VirtualBench

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Solved!
Go to Solution.

I ran into a similar problem on my Dell machine. I was able to work around the problem by going into the BIOS options and disabling booting from USB mass storage devices. Machine boots without problem now.

IMac G5 won't boot from an external Seagate Freeagent FireWire drive

Hi guys,
So, the internal drive on my sister's iMac G5 finally died a few days ago. On my advice, she stopped in to Best Buy and bought a Seagate Freeagent Xtreme 1tb external drive (with FireWire). I had her connect the Seagate to her MacBook (in Windows Boot Camp mode) and use the Seagate Manager to disable the drive's power-saving mode. I then talked her through using her OS X Leopard DVD to (re)partition the Seagate (using the Apple Partition Map scheme) and format it as Mac OS Extended Journaled, and Leopard installed just fine on the external drive (from the G5, via USB).
However, now when she tried to boot from the external over FireWire (by holding down "Option" on power-on), it plays dead (no lights), and doesn't show as a viable boot device. When plugged into the laptop (also over firewire) it shows up just fine on the desktop. We would use USB to boot, but her G5 doesn't support booting over USB.
What am I missing here? We've been working on this for three days, and have gotten so freakin' close to having her iMac up and running again, but the cursed Seagate drive simply refuses to "kick in" at bootup and work on the G5!
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Honestly, that's exactly what I would do if I had hands-on access to the iMac, but such a swap is a bit beyond my sister's skill-set.
We never did figure out what the issue was, so I had my sister return the drive and order one from MacSales.com (aka Other World Computing) - if anyone will have a Mac-friendly drive, it's those folks!
Huxley

My 27" iMac Freezes, Won't boot from DVD

My iMac has started to freeze up every few minutes. Every so often, it becomes unresponsive; the mouse cursor still moves (sometimes it turns into a beach ball), but I can't click or type anything. Whenever this happens, the hard drive begins to churn as if it's reading or writing something big. This usually lasts only about thirty seconds to a minute, but it's happening with frustrating regularity.
I've been trying to troubleshoot this for a few days, now. I'll walk you through the steps I've tried so far.
I ran a check on the hard drive with Disk Utility. This came back with a message about the files/directories not matching up with their expected counts. The solution it suggested was to boot from a Snow Leopard disc and let Disk Utility run a Repair Disk while the startup drive is not mounted. It was at this point that I realized that I couldn't boot from the dvd. Whether holding 'C' or 'Option', when it tries to boot from the disc, it gets to the Apple logo and then hangs.
I kept researching and found a workaround; boot into Single User Mode and perform fsck, which fixed the Disk Utility error, but did not solve the freezes/noises, and I still can't boot from the dvd.
Any ideas?

Thank you for your prompt response.
Well, I'm not sure if I explained it clearly. Holding the Option key does indeed bring up a list of bootable devices. The problem arises when control is passed to the Snow Leopard disc. The Apple logo flashes, I can hear the optical drive being accessed, but then it locks up.
I should also clarify that it's not the disc that came with the iMac. I just moved and can't find the original disc, so I borrowed my neighbor's (which came from a Macbook he bought after mine (which I bought last year)). I am under the impression that Macs can't boot from discs that are older than the version of OS X that they shipped with. I wouldn't think that's the issue, here, as his came out later than mine, but I've still got a lot to learn about life in the Appleverse.
My data should be safe--I've got an up to date Time Machine backup on an external drive. The performance issues aside, I'm really looking to understand the underlying problem(s) here.
So, one option is that the RAM might be bad. I can test that by swapping out each DIMM and checking if the problem is resolved. One thing I don't understand, though, is why bad RAM would manifest as the hard drive being accessed. Is there a definitive way to test the logic board, as there is for testing RAM?
Also, I keep thinking of other little syptoms which may or may not be related.
Recap of Symptoms:
Magic Mouse occasionally loses its magic (right click, multitouch, etc.) and needs to be turned off and on.
Free disk space fluctuates by as much as eight gigs (without my intervention).
System stalls (accompanied by HD access sounds) multiple times per hour.
Can't boot from dvds (though, this could be a version problem).
**Fixed: Disk Utility Verify Disk error.
I do understand that this might be a hardware error, and I certainly know how much trouble that sort of thing is to find/fix. I'm definitely willing to open the case and swap out DIMMs and drives, but not until I've exhausted my software solution options. *crosses fingers*

IMac G5 won't boot from CD drive, Please Help

My iMac G5 won't boot from the CD drive. There is no operating system on the hard drive so I want to install a fresh copy of Leopard. I have tried a couple different methods, but I keep getting the same end result. The first method I tried was booting from the CD drive by holding the C key during start up. The Leopard disc was automatically ejected after about 20-30 seconds. The second method I tried was booting the iMac to the "question mark file screen," which is when I inserted the Leopard disc. Usually on other Mac computers, this is when the computer will show the Apple logo and prompt you with the installation process. Not this iMac, it just ejects the disc shortly after I insert it. I'm not sure if it's the CD drive that is having the issue, the hard drive, or something else.
If you have any ideas, they would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Chris

Where did you get the CD from?
If it is from another Mac, it is probably specific to the hardware in that Mac and is not capable of boot your iMac.
Allan

External Hard Drive Not recognized when trying to boot from it.

So I am trying to boot from my external hard drive through firewire but my computer doesn't seem to recognize the external. There is some problem with my Macbook not booting up correctly and I want to backup my data before reinstalling Tiger. They did this at the Apple store and ran disk utility on it my Macbooks hard drive. I could access all my data, but now when I get home and plug in my hard drive, hold down option after booting, the only drive that pops up is the Mac HD. I read somewhere to try partitioning the external drive as Mac Journaled and I did so with my working Macbook Pro. Any ideas whats going on?

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I would have:
not let you go home without also buying
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other drives as needed
start with a clean install of the OS to a new drive
Clone your system when you do get a good install and update (Apple only)
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I am having trouble trying to boot from my lion osx install disk on a 2007 macbook. The disk ejects when I start up with the option key depressed. Anyone have any ideas?
Thank you.

How did you get a Lion OSX install disc? They don't exist. Do you mean the gray disks that came with your 2007 MacBook?
If you mean the gray disks, try starting up with the "c" key held down.
What version of OSX is on your MacBook now? Have you tried booting from the Recovery partition?

When no CD in drive bios tries to boot from NIC??

I have homed in on my issue re: "invalid partition" problems upon boot. The situation is:
When Bios (K8N Neo2 Plat bios v 1.1) set to boot from Floppy, then CD, then HDD, AND WITH a CD in the drive, I get a good boot into XP Pro SP1.
If no CD in drive, or if bios set to boot sequence floppy, HDD, CD...I get no boot and a message that I have found all over the net but with no real resolution:
"For Realtek RTL81108/8169(S or 5...can't read my own writing) Gigabit Eathernet Controller beta v1.00 (030811)
Client MAC ADDR (whole lot of numbers) GUID FFFF....FFFF (whole lot of Fs)
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Similar error here..
I am booting up my system for the first time. It boots up past the Platinum screen, But then it gives me the following errors:
For Realtek RTL8110S/8169S Gigabit Ethernet Controller beta v 1.00 (030811)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
His fix was..
lol... I'll go ahead and tell you. I was getting all those weird errors.... saying files were corrupt and such. I noticed that in the bios it was reading my CD-RW drive as Slave and wasn't recognizing my DVD drive at all. So... I put the jumper for the DVD Drive on Master.... popped in the Windows XP CD and everything worked fine.
It's a long shot, but looks like he had a jumper wrong, and it fooled the BIOS into booting from a network.
Sounds to me like something is fooling yours.
You can get that error with RIS, but XP doesn't have RIS as such.
GUID FFFF....FFFF (whole lot of Fs) is the GUID of your firewire.
Like a NIC has a MAC address, a firewire port has a GUID. (lots of digits, more than a MAC)

I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it jus goes to the restore options

I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it jus goes to the restore options

Bahamaguy wrote:
I have a MacBook pro late 2011 version it's not booting up ....
So what you want is to be able to boot from OS X and retrieve your files
Create a data recovery/undelete external boot drive
Of course if it's not booting up, it's easier to fix in place
..Step by Step to fix your Mac
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/
...so I am trying to boot from a USB recovery drive but when I select it nothing happens it just goes to the restore options
"Recovery HD" is a partition on your boot drive which you option or commnad r key held at boot time to get into and then repair the Macintish HD partition.
If you have this on a external USB thumb drive, then that's all it is, no OS X, programs or files.
If your talking a USB external drive, it has to be a OS X bootable clone made with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper and the option key held at boot time gives you that boot option.
Most commonly used backup methods
So what your saying is you have a external clone and by holding the option key down at boot all you get is it directly going to Recovery HD?
There is no Startup Manager option to choose what to boot from?
This could mean Apple changed something, or your external bootable clone isn't one, or the wrong software used so it's not being recognized by Startup Manager as a bootable option.
What did you use to make the external OS X USB bootable drive?

Ibook g4 (2005) wont boot from cd. always wants to boot from hd. how do i change the boot sequence?

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Hello and welcome to the support community.
Why do you need to go into the firmware?
If the disk is a boot disk like Mac OS X, then all you need to do is hold down 'C' key or the option key while the disk is in the drive and the iBook is booting up (After the chime)
If either doesn't work, then there must be an issue with the disk not being a boot disk or corrupted. Alternatively a problem with the optical drive. You don't need to go into the firmware to change any boot selection.
Hope this helps

BB iMac G3 Won't Boot From CD

I can't seem to get my friend's G3 iMac (Bondi Blue) that to boot from a CD. It's spent it's life as part of a corporate network so on boot it tries to load something from the network called "Macintosh Manager." Because it is no longer connected to that and I don't have an admin password, I can't get any further. It forces me to shutdown.
I don't have the original OS9 systems disks, but I do have a OSX 10.2 install disk. But I can't get the CDROM drive to boot the disk. I can hear it spin up for 2-3 seconds, but then it stops. It continues to try this until I eject the CD, then it goes into it's Macintosh Manager behavior described above.
I suspect the CD drive is bad, or perhaps the drive control electronics on the logic board are shot. Any ideas?
Frank

Depending on just how paranoid they were at that company, they could have made it very difficult to boot from an alternate source of software. But if you can find a Mac OS 9 CD, try booting from that and removing anything with "Multiple Users", "MultiUser Startup", or "Mac Manager" in its name, and you may succeed in defeating it.
The Bondi Blue iMac is very much like an early iBook with an integrated CRT. It uses a very similar insubstantial CD Drive. But changing Hardware requires removing the chassis, so I would try the OS 9 CD first. OS X 10.2 is very cranky. It may just be deciding not to boot...because!

"Missing Operating System" when trying to boot from USB

I have a macbook air (3,2), and I'm trying to install Arch onto the partition that currently has Ubuntu. I have tried a few different ways to get the Arch core iso onto the usb key drive, but no matter what I do, I am ending up with the message "Missing Operating System" when I boot into it.
I started out using the instructions from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/US … tion_Media for writing it on OSX, using diskutil unMount, then the dd with bs=8192, and of=/dev/disk2
When that didn't work, I tried booting into my ubuntu install, and used just a plain
sudo dd if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdb
Still no luck, so then I went to my old standby of unetbootin, which didn't do any better. I just tried yet again with the dd in ubuntu, and I'm still not having any luck.
Here's some of the relevant info I could find:
$ sudo dd if=Downloads/archlinux-2011.08.19-core-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb
772096+0 records in
772096+0 records out
395313152 bytes (395 MB) copied, 1.55667 s, 254 MB/s
$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 8065 MB, 8065646080 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 7691 cylinders, total 15753215 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
One interesting thing I noticed was that the dd took about 10 minutes in mac osx, and under 2 seconds in linux. That seemed like a pretty big difference between the two systems, but I'm not sure if that's related to the batch size on the write, or to the implementation of dd used in OSX.
Is there something obvious I'm missing? I know the computer is able to boot from this key drive because I was able to boot an Ubuntu livecd from it just a few days ago. Unfortunately, the MBA won't boot from my external cd/dvd drive because it's not the apple brand super-drive, and I don't want to spend the money for a super-drive, so a cd-based install isn't an option.
Really looking forward to playing with Arch, because some of my friends recommended it to me highly. I'm a former gentooer (years ago) who became fed-up with installing *everything* from source. I can't stand ubuntu doing everything for me, and debian always seemed so far behind the curve on everything, so Arch seems like the perfect OS if I can just get into the installer. :)
Thanks so much!
~Maquis

Oh, forgot to mention, I did the dd from ubuntu with both bs=4M and without a bs argument. the version without the bs argument is the one that went really fast.
Neither version would boot, so I don't think that the way I'm writing it is the problem.
I did just notice that if I just do a sudo fdisk -l without specifying the drive, I have 2 entries for my drive:
Disk /dev/sdb: 8065 MB, 8065646080 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 7691 cylinders, total 15753215 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/sdb1: 395 MB, 395313152 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 377 cylinders, total 772096 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x3946b2c9
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1p1 * 0 772095 386048 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS

Imac 27 will only boot from internal and from factory install DVD?

I was trying to create a bootable external source for my iMac 27 and came across a pretty odd scenario. One that Apple iteslef says they have never seen before. Love any feedback on how to create a external bootable source. Below are my notes from the 45 minute conversation I just had with Applecare.
My iMac 27 purchased in December, 2010 Will not boot from:
Apple Factory Install DVD (white printed with Snow Leopard)
TechTool Pro 5.06 DVD
SD Card with Bootlable installation
EXT HDD with previous bootable (Leopard 10.5.9) system on it
eDrive on an EXT HDD
I had a 45 conversation with Applecare and the tech has never heard or seen a situation like this one.
Every source shows up if I hold the "option" key down upon power up.
Every source shows up in the System Prefs Startup window (though there was one oddity that he had not seen before. I have to authenticate each and every time I try to change my startup disk in the Startup Disk Prefs)
Every source other than the internal has the same result if I try to boot into it, gray screen with dark gray Apple logo, no gears running, no optical accessing, just the gray screen forever.
We reset my PRAM and tried again. No change
Then the Applecare tech had to get off the phone in order to do some further research.
He came back and we tried to startup from the DVD that shipped with my iMac, not the white factory Snow Leopard I got from Amazon, but the gray install DVD from Apple.
This one booted.
We repaired permissions and checked the internal disk from the Apple Gray Install DVD.
That is as far as the tech could go. He is sending me out a new copy of Snow Leopard, but is unable to support me in my quest to boot from an external source.
I am going to try and create a bootable external source using the gray install dvd instead of the commercial Now Leopard one and see what happens.
Thanks,
Henry

The point is that V.K. is correct.
You cannot create a bootable disk for your iMac from the factory Snow Leopard DVD because your machine was released after Snow Leopard was and as such relies on operating system changes and drivers that exist solely on the disc that came with your machine.
I'm really surprised if an AppleCare agent didn't know that.
To create a bootable external drive either use your Software Restore disc or create a bootable clone of your internal drive using an app like Carbon Copy Cloner.

IMac always tries to boot from CD

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