any mac users in the house? need a little help

[Doom9]

I'm the proud owner of a 2009 mac mini (long story, I'll eventually write all about it).. and prior to upgrading (4 GB ram, SSD disk), I wanted to see if I could figure out the whole booting from the CD or booting from another drive thing out.

There's a long story here as well but basically I can't quite get the whole boot keys thing figured out. I have a standard keyboard, not an Apple one, so option = windows key and alt = command (apple) key.

Boot from CD should be pressing c, right? But it took me about 10 approaches to actually get a boot from CD - so when do you press C? After or prior to pressing the power button? Prior or after the "bing" sound? Or between the bing and the screen going grey?

And when the box finally booted from the CD, it then refused to boot back from the harddisk. No matter which mouse key I held down and when, no matter if I tried the F12 key or the space bar, I just couldn't get the CD out, period. I don't have the appropriate screwdriver so I couldn't up the drive and I ended up installing Vista (of all things) just so that I could get the disk out (fortunately the new disc was already in then so I still have my mac disk safe and sound).

Then there's the option(windows) button to select a boot volume, right? Well, I can't get that either. Once in many attempts to zap the pram (should be alt-windows-p-r) I instead actually got to see a list of drives to boot from (just one there of course).

So.. something is clearly wrong here and I don't have a mac keyboard to try it with (not that I'd expect anything to change and in the end I prefer my windows keyboard anyway).

BTW.. I used Ukulele to create my custom keyboard layout to make things more Windows like - though I figure the key remapping only kicks in when OS X is started so it shouldn't influence the boot keys (though just to be sure I tried swapping the alt and control keys in the shortcuts, but also to no avail).

[Revgen]

My brother owns one and seems happy with it. He brings it over to the house with him when he visits. It's pretty convenient.

I've never been really interested in one. I don't really do anything like graphics design, film editing, or anything that would take advantage of it.

He'll be over here next week. If you haven't solved it by then, I'll ask him if he knows.

[Shinigami-Sama]

just keep mashing it man

I've seen many problems with mac-minis though; horrible cooling solution in those little guys
as for ejecting you need to hold the key for a couple seconds, and they don't like to eject sometimes even with mac keyboards. so try swaping for a differnt keyboard until it behaves -- I swaped 4 keyboards on an emac before it finally let me eject

[Doom9]

as for ejecting you need to hold the key for a couple seconds

But when exactly? Do you press the key, keep holding it while you press the power button (kinda hard to do with some shortcuts), then let go when exactly?
On a PC, you press the key(s) to enter the BIOS or related things (e.g. RAID controller setup) prior to the boot beep. And then you have OS options after the beep (like F8 to change into safe mode).. how does that translate for a MAC?
By the way.. the little guy runs Windows 7 just fine - I couldn't possibly stay with Vista so I went for Windows 7 (the original plan all along but Mac OS proved to be less bad thatn I expected.. you just need to make it through the culture shock and then reconfigure everything - once you have your keyboard layout and most often used keyboard shortcuts it's just a different (and often with less options available) way of doing things. I actually managed to get high def content playback with multichannel audio working - it just takes a lot more horsepower than MPC HC.

[smok3]

you just need to make it through the culture shock and then reconfigure everything

wont work with my experience, there is just always a better way of doing things on win (better software, better everything...), the shock #2 will be to deal with apple advertising (when you actually get struck with how wrong all that is in so many ways).
p.s. writing this on mac, struggling to finish certain movie using fcp (i wish this was pc with premiere).

[Shinigami-Sama]

Originally Posted by Doom9

But when exactly?

goes back to the first part; keep mashing it
after the gray screen is finished

[iwod]

Cant you just do
1. Click System Preferences
2. Click Startup Disk
???

[Doom9]

iwod: that requires that you can boot into mac os x. and if you read my first post again

And when the box finally booted from the CD, it then refused to boot back from the harddisk.

I tried on another mac (imac this time..) with another keyboard.. same story. I should be getting a mac keyboard tonight for a tryout and asked a friend who also recently got a mini but with a mac keyboard to crosscheck. If that won't help, I'll see if the guys at the genius bar really are geniuses.. they'll have to demonstrate to me how they get my mini to boot from whichever device I like - and reliably so.

[The_Dukester]

Hold the C key down as soon as you hear the startup chime.

You can also eject the CD by holding down the mouse button as soon as you restart or startup.

Others:

Option Display all bootable volumes (Startup Manager)
Shift Perform Safe Boot (start up in Safe Mode)
C Start from a bootable disc
T Start in FireWire target disk mode
N Start from NetBoot server
X Force Mac OS X startup (if non-Mac OS X startup volumes are present)
Command-V Start in Verbose Mode
Command-S Start in Single User Mode.

[Doom9]

Hold the C key down as soon as you hear the startup chime.

And for how long? On a PC you press ESC (or whatever gets you into the BIOS / raid controller setup / etc) just once for the same amount of time like you hit any other key during regular typing.

[[P]ako]

If the mac won't eject the CD at all, you can unfold a paper clip and stick it through one of the ends of the slot (I think it's on the right), there should a stopper or something, push it and the mac will cough up the CD.

And yeah, Macs work better with their proprietary keyboards. Get one, you'll like it.

[Shinigami-Sama]

Originally Posted by Doom9

And for how long? On a PC you press ESC (or whatever gets you into the BIOS / raid controller setup / etc) just once for the same amount of time like you hit any other key during regular typing.

1-2seconds

[Doom9]

@genroxbro: please don't hijack other people's threads. Don't take me giving you a pointer as an invitation to further pollute this thread - I found that VLC and mplayer for OSX are much better playback options than QT.
I made an appointment with the Apple geniuses for tomorrow.. it oughta be fun to see they eyes widen when they see my mini start up with Win7

[Doom9]

As usual, comes cruch time, suddenly there's a solution.

I figured I'd give swapping USB ports a whirl and suddenly things started working. What I figured out so far is that you don't need to press the modifiers right after the boot chime.. rather you wait 1-2 seconds (basically shortly before your mouse becomes active (I have a Logitech G5 which is nice enough to indicate when it's active) or when the screen comes on (that might vary though.. I have the latest Dell 30" screen here and it takes a bit to show a picture after it gets a signal.. but we can say once the power indicator turns blue meaning it gets a signal) and then hold the key for 2-3 seconds.

So far I managed to do boot from CD (c), Firewire mode (T) as well as boot volume selection (that one was a tricky bastard.. they say option, and one of my keyboards actually has the mac indicators and option is on windows.. but it seems that's only when OSX is active.. at boot time they are swapped (they say alt and windows are swapped on mac keyboards).. so on a PC keyboard, you press the alt button.

The one I still cannot get to work (gone through 4 mouses now) is eject the CD.. and I have no clue while at some point on Saturday, the darned thing would only boot from the CD anymore (forcing me to go ahead with the hardware upgrade and install windows only so that I could eject the CD).

Well, I still have my date tomorrow so I'm looking forward to what they have to say as to when exactly and exactly for how long you're supposed to press those keys (for me.. pressing c right after the chime for 2 seconds didn't do anything.. it really took waiting for 2 seconds and then pressing it). I'll keep you posted.

[Blue_MiSfit]

My rule of thumb is to just start tapping the key an instant after hearing the chime. I tap it 2-3 times and on the last tap, simply hold it until I get indication that the modifier is working.

Macs are fun little computers I want a dual nehalem mac pro...

~MiSfit

[chainring]

As Blue_Misfit stated, you can start tapping the key after the startup "Bong". If, for some reason, you don't hear the bong, just hold down the Command (Apple) key immediately after power on; that will get you a list of ALL bootable devices.

As a side note, I'm using a first gen Intel Mac Mini with Core Duo 1.66 and 1.5GB RAM for media duties. It's hooked up to a Westinghouse LVM-37W3 (1080p) LCD via DVI. Plex.app is used for playback, and it's awesome! Plex handles videos that choke VLC and MPlayer.

[Doom9]

The apple store was quite a bit of fun - me coming with my keyboard that has a windows key of, then the non mac mouse and on top of that a mac that would boot into Windows 7 made for a funny experience ("this is because it's Windows" yada yada yada).

Bottom line, the keyboard works as I had already found, but the mouse works once every once in a while so I settled on buying a "mighty" mouse for emergencies. And just to be safe I have a mac keyboard as well though I absolutely prefer my Logitech Wave - it's much more ergonomical.

Today I found that if I hold option to get a list of boot volumes, that list is actually dynamic.. so you can plug in an USB drive and it will be listed, and you can enter a CD/DVD and it will be losted. Similarly, pressing F12 will eject the disc again at this state.. so I just found my workaround for non Apple IO devices.

I had the guy at the apple store perform a PRAM zap to see that it really works but I'm afraid this might've broken something.. the device now sits in the grey screen doing nothing for almost 30 seconds before it boots from anything... any ideas on how to get this back to the normal wait of a couple of seconds?


Also, I installed plex and indeed it doesn't choke on 1080p - but otherwise I find it very disconcerting.. where's my position slider, where's my volume control, where's the audio track selector, how do I get it to make use of the multichannel audio setup I have?

Funny sidenote.. so far I've had an apple compatible 5.1 audio device: Equip USB to 5.1 audio converter. It comes with a system preference applet that lets you set it app. Then the first time you start VLC it bitches about the midi properties not being set up.. but if you go in there and set it to 5.1, then you actually lose 5.1.. only 2 speakers will be active anymore. Set it to stereo, and all is fine.

Now I connected a more advanced device - the Sweex external 7.1 audio device which is said to be Windows only - so it has no system preference applet but I can configure it in the midi properties and multichannel works in VLC.


Last but not least.. does anyone how I get the mouse to accelerate linearly? Acceleration seems to be exponential.. move it a little and it goes very slow, move it a bit more and suddenly it starts to take off. My G5 laser mouse has its own speed setting and at full speed it seems about as linear as on Windows but I always have to press the + button on the mouse after booting into OSX.

[Doom9]

Figure out how to bypass the boot delay by setting the boot volume from outside OS X (it doesn't want to let me set the internal disc with Win7 as boot device).
And I haven't tried this yet but this seems to be the solution to get the mouse working the same way as it does in every other OS.