Hi All, I found an interesting alternative way to start up your computer if you have an Apple Remote and you are booting into a separate partition or from another hard drive: holding down the menu key (the depressible circular region that is below the raised clickable circle of controls; it's near the center of the Apple Remote) acts like pressing the option key on your Apple Keyboard.
The Apple Remote is a small control unit, that Apple has been including with new Macs sold over the last year and a half or longer. It's used to control multimedia such as playing iTunes, movies, etc. remotely, and works with VoiceOver. Because a number of people have posted about using Bootcamp to install Windows on a separate partition, and others may want to either start up from a backup of their operating system on another hard drive, or be using linux partitions or external hard drives, this seemed like a pretty interesting option. To change the default startup location when you turn on a Mac, you hold down the Option key as you power on, or just after you push the "On" button. If there are multiple partitions or drives attached that you can choose to boot from, you'll be given the option of selecting one of these. Holding down the menu button on the Apple Remote works like pressing the Option key on your keyboard. This was reported in MacFixIt a couple of weeks ago as a work-around for a user who was having problems with his keyboard: http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071113074656308 Tuesday, November 13 2007 AT 07:46 AM PST Using your Apple Remote as a "startup key" <begin quote> It seems that if the Menu key is held down on the Apple remote during the boot process it will act as though the option key was held down. . . . your readers may want to know about using the Apple remote to select the Bootcamp partition or any other alternate partition on their hard drive. <end quote> This might also be useful for people using non-Apple keyboards, although using an Apple keyboard is highly recommended on this list.
