September 2012
Beginner
762 pages
29h 25m
English
Content preview from Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Startup Disks
When you turn the Mac on, it hunts for a startup disk—that is, a disk containing a System folder. If you’ve ever seen the dispiriting blinking folder icon on a Mac’s screen, you know what happens when the Mac can’t find a startup disk. It blinks like that forever, or until you find and insert a disk with a viable System folder on it.
Usually, a startup disk is a hard drive or a DVD. (Not all external USB disks are capable of starting up the Mac, but any internal hard drive can, and any external FireWire or Thunderbolt hard drive can.) You can even put a stripped-down, emergency copy of Mountain Lion onto a flash drive and start up your Mac that way; see The Homemade Installer Disk.
Selecting a Startup Disk
It’s perfectly possible to have more than one startup disk simultaneously attached to your Mac. Some veteran Mac fans deliberately create other startup disks—using external hard drives, for example—so that they can easily start the Mac up from a backup disk, or from a different version of the OS.
Only one System folder can be operational at a time. So how does the Mac know which to use as its startup disk? You make your selection in the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences (Figure 9-11).
Tip
If you’re in a hurry to start the machine up from a different disk, just click the disk icon and then click Restart in the System Preferences window. You don’t have to close the System Preferences window first.
Figure 9-11. In the Startup Disk pane of System Preferences, the currently ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.