You have the choice of setting your computer to either automatically using System Preferences or overriding the System Preferences using Startup Manager at boot time. Similarly, your Mac can also boot into any other OS, provided your Mac's hardware supports the operating system. It is important to emphasize here that your startup disk may not necessarily contain the Mac operating system.įor instance, if you are using Boot Camp, your Mac system can boot into Windows directly. What is a startup disk?Ī startup disk can be described as a partition of a volume or a drive containing a usable OS. Startup Your Mac with Startup Disk Preferencesīefore we go into details on how to start up your Mac using Startup Disk preferences, let us take a look at the meaning of startup disk. Any Mac system will be able to startup from Recovery partition using the Boot Manager whether it is running on Lion (10.7) or later versions. To this end, you will need a bootable drive, whether it is a mirrored external drive or a USB installer drive for earlier versions of Mac.
This post will cover two ways of starting up your Mac system from bootable media.
A Mac system can be booted from bootable media instead of the primary startup disk due to certain situations such as troubleshooting fault, partitioning, repairing disks, update, reinstalling the operating system, or even format everything.
