Simply reboot your Mac and hold the Option key on your keyboard as soon as you see the Mac’s startup Apple logo. But for those who want to use multiple internal drives or partitions, Windows via Boot Camp, or boot to external drives, you’ll need to use the Mac’s built-in Startup Manager. Most Mac users will probably only ever use the single drive that came with their system. To use this feature, you’ll need an active Internet connection and a Mac introduced after the public availability of OS X Lion, which includes the Mid-2011 MacBook Air and up. Further, if your Mac’s drive lacks a recovery partition for any reason, you may still be able to access macOS recovery tools via macOS Internet Recovery, which loads the recovery information directly from Apple’s servers.

To perform recovery tasks on older versions of macOS, such as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, users needed to boot from the install DVD.Ī recovery partition will be created by default on new macOS installations and upgrades, but not every Mac configuration is supported, including RAID system drives. Recovery Mode is possible thanks to the installation of a hidden recovery partition on your Mac’s hard drive and allows the user to perform the aforementioned tasks without needing a macOS DVD or USB installer. You can let go of the keys when you see a screen similar to the screenshot below. Keep holding as your Mac boots, which may take a few moments depending on its specific configuration.

To use Recovery Mode, reboot or start your Mac and hold the Command and R keys simultaneously on your keyboard as you see the iconic white Apple logo against a black screen.

Starting with the release of macOS Lion in 2011, Macs have offered a Recovery Mode that users can access to diagnose hardware issues, restore Time Machine backups, manage hard drives, and even reinstall macOS itself.

Mac command for disk utility at startup