I have a Mac Pro with a non-flashed video card. Yes, the video works just fine when the machine is booted (HD 270x). Since the card is not flashed, I obviously cannot see the boot screen.
The problem I have is that I also have Boot Camp on the machine for a Windows 7 installation. I used to simply have a simple Automator generated application for blessing the BOOTCAMP partition and rebooting the machine. However, with the upgrade to El Capitan and the associated System Integrity Protection (SIP) you can no longer simply bless the partition and thus my application no longer works without disabling SIP.
I'd prefer to have SIP enabled, so short of finding an EFI ROM for the Radeon HD 270X (automatic answer accept if you have one! ;-)) I figure I could live out my days navigating the boot screen in the dark.. what, two right-arrow keys and a 'return' wait a few mins? Should be easy, no? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work and instead appears to get stuck to the point that I need to reboot AND zap the PRAM to get back to normal!
My question is, am I just mis-navigating the boot screen and the PRAM zapping is just because somehow I messed up? Or is it that telling the Mac to go to the boot screen (Option key during startup) got it stuck somehow because it didn't see a video card it could use? Better yet, is there another way I can still use Boot Camp with a non-flashed PC video card?
thanks
Best Answer
Whenever you want to reboot into Bootcamp, open System Preferences and then the Startup Disk preference Pane. Select your bootcamp partition from the list, and then hit restart.
Your computer will automatically reboot into Bootcamp. This setting only affects the next reboot, which means that whenever you're done in Windows, you can reboot normally to get back to macOS X.
You can expedite this process slightly by creating a shortcut to the Startup Disk preference pane.