How to Change the Mac Start-Up Disk

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jason former Mac genius and today I am going to show you how to change your startup disc. The reason you would want to change this disc is if you needed to start up from a CD or you had an external hard drive that you would need to start up from. So what we are going to do is we are going to go into the Apple menu, system preferences, and you will be familiar with these panes by now since you have watched some of these tutorials. Under our system pane here we have startup disc so I am going to click that. What this does is it gives me every available disc to the system that has a startup system on it. So this is actually a CD that we can choose to start up from or this is the actual system that we are running right now. If we choose to start up from the CD you will see that whatever you have selected is going to give you a brief description here in this field and then if we hit restart, it is going to restart utilizing that system disc. You can also restart this computer in target disc mode and what that does is it starts up your computer in a firewire hard drive mode so when you start up you can either start up here by clicking on the target disc mode or you can start up and hold down the T key on the keyboard and what that does is it initiates your hard drive to be accessible by other computers. So it is a firewire hard drive. So I start this computer up holding down the T key. I am going to see a symbol on my screen that is a firewire symbol and I'm going to plug that into another computer via firewire 400 or 800 port and what that is going to do is enable another system to access this computer as a firewire external hard drive. But for right now we are going to take this system, because that is the system startup that we are running now and we are just going to close that and by closing this window you dedicate that service. So that is how you change your startup disc on OS X. I'm Jason, former Mac genius, and I will talk to you next time."