View Boot Up Text On Your Mac 3

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View Boot Up Text On Your Mac

Hey

I was wondering about how to do this trick for a long time. If you a familiar with the Windows Operating System (who isn’t?) you will notice various boot up text about specific parts of the operating system. On a Mac this is fully covered with the Apple Splash logo. If you want to view the text it only takes a short cut command on boot.

During the first couple of seconds, when you hear the bong, press Command + V. It is a simple as that. Lots of different sort of text will appear about your kernel, attached cards all sorts of stuff. If you look at the image below (which is very poor) you can see what happens. It is really only useful for people who are running diagnostics or nerds like me who are interested in these things. As a side note it will also show the verbose output when you shutdown.


If you are interested in taking pictures of start ups that are better than the blurry mess that I made above you need a second person. It took me three restarts to get that picture. The first one failed because my camera wasn’t set up correctly. Second was done with a short focal lens and flash, but it ended up as a white blob. The second was taken using a long focal range, but it took me so long to press the short cut and to run back 2 meters I nearly missed it. A friend would definitively make it easier.

Post Image Via: Savant Technology


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Where To Next?

3 Responses to “View Boot Up Text On Your Mac”

  1. 1

    You can make this persist by adding this argument to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist:

    Kernel
    mach_kernel
    Kernel Flags
    -v

    Comment By kevin on July 15th, at 5:35 pm

  2. 2

    [...] see lots of text whizzing by which is not a lot of use to you. I have written about this command here. It will also show Verbose output on shut [...]

    Comment By Useful Startup/Boot Keys For The Mac | Mac Tricks And Tips on January 5th, at 8:32 pm

  3. 3

    another way is to set up a temporary virtual machine and then use a boot-132 cd in vmware fusion. after you swap out to the leopard install media, start recording with a video capture tool (ishowu). you don’t have to wait for it to get to the install screen; after you get what you need, shut down and delete that temporary vm. now fire up quicktime and isolate the frame you need!

    Comment By lowell on April 20th, at 6:25 am

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