MacOS – How to tell a macmini to stop booting to Windows from a macbook pro

bootcampfirewiremac-minimacbook promacos

I need to be able to control a mac mini without a screen and I think using screensharing would be enough. I've enabled screensharing, setup a manual IP address and I have an ethernet cable.

The problem is I don't have display to use on the mac mini and I currently borrowed a keyboard and a firewire cable to setup screensharing:

  1. booted mac mini in target mode (wish there was a way to do it without the keyboard)
  2. booted the macbook holding the alt key and choosing the firewire drive

The problem is the mac mini has a bootcamp partition setup to which it boots by default. I googled a bit and tried the System Preferences > Startup Disk option then the /etc/fstab route but no joy: the mac mini still boots to Windows.

How can I get the macmini to simply boot to it's osx all the time (given that I have to change the settings on a macbook with a firewire cable) ?

Best Answer

The system stores the boot choice in NVRAM, so you might reset it by powering off and then holding command-option-p-r while you hear the start chimes repeat 2 or 3 times. At that point, it should choose the first bootable system on the internal drive. IF that doesn't work, you could post the filesystem layout - but a corrupt NVRAM settings file would explain why your choice of Startup Disk wasn't respected.