I often boot into an external startup disk. In order to do this, I need to access the Startup Manager by holding alt/option while rebooting and then selecting the disk I want to boot up into.
Since I do this so often, I wanted a more streamlined way to boot into the external drive. Is there a way to boot up into a specific external drive, without having to use the Startup Manager?
I could change the startup disk to something else, but the problem is that this is common to both disks – i.e. while I am starting up from Macintosh HD 1
and select Macintosh HD 2
, when I boot up in Macintosh HD 2
the startup disk will also be Macintosh Disk 2
. have to change this every single time, so I'm looking for something more like a shortcut to boot into the startup disk Macintosh HD x
.
Best Answer
Boot to Macintosh HD 1, launch Keychain Access and create a new generic password item with the name boot_key in your login keychain with the following attributes (replace "klanomath" with your admin user name and "Passw0rd" with your admin user's password):
The password is self-evidently also klanomath's login password. security is always allowed to use the key! The exec security can be found in /usr/bin/.
Then open Automator and create a new service.
Add the action "Run AppleScript" and paste the following code (replace klanomath with your admin's user name below):
Screenshot of Automator:
The middle part of the AppleScript (tell application "System Events"... tries to quit all open apps gracefully.
Open System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services, choose the service name and apply a shortcut (in my example altcmdB).
On your other boot volume you have to perform the same steps but replace the boot drive in the second do shell script: