Booting from a CD in Mac OS X when ‘C’ doesn’t work

by Brian on 2/20/2010

I was trying to fix a Mac Mini tonight, which wouldn’t boot from CD using the normal method of holding down the C key when you power it up. However, I was able to boot into single user mode by holding down CMD+S when the system powered up. I found this trick to force Mac OS X to boot from the CD by typing this at the command line:

bless –device /dev/disk1s3 –setBoot –nextonly

You may have to use a different different disk/partition instead of /dev/disk1s3. I just guessed until I found the right one. After typing in that command, type “reboot” to restart the system.

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  • could you not just hold down the option key on startup? That should give you the boot menu. This is a neat trick you've found regardless...
  • In my case holding down the option key did not work either. I am guessing it is because my mac mini does not like my logitech USB keyboard.
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