A minor puzzle arrived from a reader who was trying to choose his boot drive by holding down the Option key at startup. OS X has a variety of keyboard combinations you can press to invoke different ...

Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

Do you use multiple partitions on your Mac? Maybe you use Apple’s Boot Camp tool to boot your Mac into Windows occasionally, or maybe you’ve got a Mac Pro loaded with four drives partitioned into 16 ...

While users may never want to have to rely on them, it's comforting to know that PCs running modern operating systems have fail-safes and recovery modes that can help get the system back up and ...

When Apple Computer Inc. introduced Open Firmware with the first G3 Macintosh computers, it was big news because it allowed Apple to easily modify system information previously stored in ROM. This ...

Safe mode is an important troubleshooting tool. It boots the OS in such a way that it uses the bare minimum files and apps to start and run. This can help you isolate issues, figure out where problems ...

Apple's newly released MacBook Pros do away with the classic F-sharp major boot-up chime that has been a part of the Mac since 1999. Thankfully, for those who want to keep it, there's an easy way to ...

The iconic Mac startup sound has evolved over the years, but it is a distinctive part of being a Mac user. Sometimes, though, you just want to boot your Mac up silently. You can keep it from sounding ...