Booting New World Macs

New world refers to the second generation of PowerPC Macintosh computers. New world Macs come equipped with a Boot Manager that loads before Open Firmware. The Boot manager can be invoked by holding down the option key while your Mac starts.

When the Boot Manager has loaded it searches for devices with a bootable system, and then allows you to choose which one to boot with. If the Boot Manager is still searching for devices and your preferred boot device is selected, you can boot immediately by clicking the mouse once and pressing the key combination command + period.

Once you have chosen a device within the Boot Manager you can click the continue button, or press the key combination ctrl + z to go to Open Firmware. The device selection will still be present when you run the command mac-boot within Open Firmware.

Booting from Internal Drives

The alias hd selects the internal drive of your computer.

Booting the system folder on an internal drive:

boot hd:,\\:tbxi

Booting from a file on an internal drive:

boot hd:\bootscript

Booting from a file on a specific partition with an internal drive:

boot hd:2,bootscript

Booting from External Drives

When booting from an external drive you need to determine what the device id is for the device you're trying to use. You can explore the device tree within Open Firmware by running the devalias command. The examples below are using the device id of a USB device.

Booting the system folder on an external drive:

boot usb0/disk:2,\\:tbxi

Booting from a file on an external drive:

boot usb0/disk:2,\bootscript

Opening the Boot Manager

After booting into Open Firmware, entering multi-boot will take you to the boot manager which is otherwise accessible by holding the option/alt key while booting.