While the Mac prides itself on being so user friendly, it’s a computer like any other… written by humans… worked on by humans… and so, there’s always a chance for problems and things to go wrong.

One handy thing to do is to set your Mac to boot into verbose mode. This way when your Mac boots, instead of just seeing the spinning daisy and other pretty non-informative information, you can see all this stream of geeky stuff going by. You probably won’t know nor care what most of it means, and that’s fine. But there will come that day when something odd will happen. Maybe you installed something new, maybe something on the computer decided to go south, and now the machine acts strange at boot time. This is when you’ll be happy to have booted up in verbose mode. Even if you don’t understand what’s going on, being able to relay that information to your local geek helper can be useful towards remedying your problem.

There are two ways to do it.

The simple way is to hold down a key combo at boot time: command-v. That is, hold down the command key and the “v” key as soon as you hear the restart chime. The command key is the key immediately adjacent to the spacebar, with the Apple and little “cloverleaf” symbol on it (I tried to display the symbol here, but WordPress is acting strange). The verbose mode should start immediately and most obviously, and then you can release the key combo. The benefit of this approach is it’s on-demand, but the downside of this approach is it’s on-demand; once the boot sequence starts, you cannot press cmd-v to see what’s going on so if something ugly happens during the boot process you won’t see it.

A more permanent solution is to launch the Terminal.app and enter this command at the prompt:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Which will pass the “verbose” option to the boot arguments stored in the nvram of the machine. This way every time you boot your machine it will boot in verbose mode. This is how I set every Mac I own. 99% of the time I don’t care what’s scrolling by on screen, but there are days when I’m glad to see the information going by.

One thing to note. If you zap your PRAM (command-option-p-r at the boot chime) it will clear the nvram and your verbose argument will be lost. So when zapping your PRAM, zap it, and as soon as the machine chimes again immediately press cmd-v to go into verbose mode. Then once the machine is properly started up and you have logged in, launch the Terminal.app and enter the nvram command.