Alt boot not working on Mac Mini

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Level 1

6 points

Alt boot not working on Mac Mini

Hi. I've run Windows 10 in a Boot Camp partition for several years without issue. To move between OSX and Win10, I restart OSX and hold down the Alt/Option key on my Apple keyboard model A1843 (the keyboard is wireless capable, but it's always plugged into the USB port. The keyboard works fine in OSX). I selected the Windows drive and Windows boots up. I have the startup disk set to the OSX partition, so when I restart Windows it automatically boots OSX. I do this several times a week.

In the last few days, I restart OSX, hold down the Option key and the boot menu does not appear. Instead, the system just boots into OSX no matter how many times I do this. I am running Sequoia and recently did the update to 15.1.1

I can set the startup disk to the Windows partition and the system then boots directly into Windows. This is a temporary workaround because it's a pain to get the system back to OSX because of the way I have Windows configured.

Help?

Mac mini, macOS 15.1

Posted on Dec 10, 2024 5:20 PM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

61,376 points

Dec 12, 2024 9:26 PM in response to VA3MTO

Maybe try a PRAM Reset (hold for three chimes if possible).

You may want to consider using rEFInd which is a graphical boot manager. Set it as the default Startup Option and you will be presented with a menu of your boot options every time (you can set a default option & timer for it). Only the installer script runs within macOS, so once installed, rEFInd is not running in macOS so it won't have any negative impact. The actual rEFInd utility is actually placed onto the hidden EFI partition (this partition already exists) and is only run up until the point it launches an OS.

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