New Mac Pro will not boot unless I hold down "C"

[agrayphoto]

I have a new Mac Pro. On startup I must hold down the "C" key or all I get is an empty blue screen. Then it starts normally. I have 4 drives. One of the new drives is my startup drive with the system and all applications. The old stock drive is now my PS scratch disk. The other two drives are set up in RAID 1.

It's really just an annoyance. The machine works perfectly otherwise. I couldn't be happier. I'm just afraid it might turn into something worse. Any ideas?

 

[macintosh tech]

I am assuming you have set the new drive as the startup disk in System Preferences?

 

[agrayphoto]

Yes. And double checked.

 

[velocityg4]

It could be that your Mac OS X partition is not Active so give this a try.

There are a lot of people who experience a b0 error on their first boot up after installation. Or the bootloader immediately takes them back to the Windows installation (on dual boot).

These people probably forgot to set the MacOSX partition "Active"

A common mantra provided here to newbies for setting up for installation is:

• Make the partition Primary
• Make the partition ID=AF (signifies an HFS partition)
• Make the partition Active

There is a built-in Unix utility in MacOSX that can be used to set your partition "Active". It is called Fdisk


Setting Your Partition "Active" Using Fdisk

Words in bold below are things you must type (followed by Enter).

1. Boot your Mac OS X install dvd
2. Once the installer is running, go to the Utilities menu and open Terminal

3. Determine which disk your MacOSX partition is on

Type diskutil list

Verify which disk number holds your partition (disk0, disk1, etc.)
​

4. Start using Fdisk

Assuming the MacOSX disk is the first disk ("disk0"), then
type fdisk -e /dev/rdisk0 <== use "rdisk" with your disk number here !!

Ignore the error "fdisk: could not open MBR file ..."
​

5. Determine which partition for MacOSX needs to be set "Active"

Type p

Verify which partition is for MacOSX (1, 2, 3, etc.)
​

6. Set the partition "Active"

Assuming it is partition 1, then
type f 1 <== use your partition number here !!
​

7. Save and exit

Type write

Type y (yes you are sure)

Type exit (to quit)
​

8. Remove the install DVD and reboot

This comes from insanelymac.com for hackintosh builders but the principal also applies to Macs. Since the Active partition contains the bootloader if a partition without a bootloader is Active then the HD will basically say that no disc is available to the BIOS. Since firmware is more intelligent by holding down the option key I think that the firmware then polls each partition on every disc for a viable operating system.

You could probably also do this from Terminal inside OS X but why not just use the install DVD?

 

[agrayphoto]

Thanks

Thanks very much for the info. That's all very complicated for a dope like me. I'm going to have to think about it for a while.