

Hold down the key combo immediately after pressing your Mac’s power button. This small memory module stores certain settings essential to your Mac’s operation, and resetting is a good first step when you’re trying to resolve tricky hardware issues. Reset CommandsĬommand + Option + P + R: Reset your Mac’s NVRAM or PRAM.
#Dark boot mac mac#
If your Mac is showing the Apple logo but failing to start completely, try this step to see where in the boot process the error occurs. This mode displays logging and diagnostic messages as your Mac boots. This is useful for running diagnostic Terminal commands or fsck, but it can’t do much beyond that.Ĭommand + V: Boot in verbose mode. macOS might do this one on its own if your installation is so messed up that you can’t boot into Recovery Mode.Ĭommand + S: Start in single user, command-line-only mode. This allows you to reinstall the build of macOS that came with your computer from the factory. Shift + Command + Option + R: Start in Internet Recovery Mode, skipping your system’s hard drive. You can use it to reinstall macOS, restore from a Time Machine backup or use Disk Utility to repair or format your hard drive. Recovery Mode is macOS’s powerful recovery suite with a bunch of options for saving or wiping your Mac. From here you can select different startup disks if any bootable partitions are available.Ĭommand + R: Boot into Recovery Mode. Since safe mode only loads essential software, you can determine whether a system process or a user-installed application is causing your problem. Don’t release the keys until you see the described behavior. If you’re restarting your Mac, press and hold the keys immediately after your Mac begins to restart. To use any of these boot keys, hold down the listed key combo as soon as you press your Mac’s power button. If you’re having trouble with your Mac, this can be a great way to troubleshoot and analyze your options. To access some specialized Mac features you’ll need to hold down one or more keys during startup.
