Booting to External Boot Drive or CD

I am having far more trouble than I should, getting my mini to boot to a CD. I finally did get it to do so, and booted (successfully BTW) to Ubuntu 5.1 (live), but it wasn't easy. I guess it's all about the timing, but when exactly does one press the key or keys required to boot to other media? And, do I have this correct:

To boot to a CD: Press C
To boot to another boot drive: Press CMD+OPTION+SHIFT+DELETE

I'd like to test my bootable copy/image of OS X on my external firewire drive, but I can't seem to get the thing to do anything but boot normally into OS X from the internal drive.

Will these keystrokes work from a re-start, or do I need to power down and back up?

I understand that I can choose my bootup disk from System Preferences, but I'd like to do it via the keyboard at bootup, just to be sure I *can* do it, if it ever becomes necessary.

So to summarize:

Which keystrokes to boot to a drive of my choice?
When are the keys to be pressed?
Should they be held down?

Thanks!

Mark

I always just used 'C' to boot to another device. I did this on my ibook G3 to install Tiger from my Mini.
It should give you a list of devices that are avaliable to boot from.

You should start holding it down at the 'shime' sound.

JGruber said:

I always just used 'C' to boot to another device. I did this on my ibook G3 to install Tiger from my Mini.
It should give you a list of devices that are avaliable to boot from.

You should start holding it down at the 'shime' sound.

Click to expand...

Thanks very much. I just did a bit more reading, and found the OPTION key mentioned (used alone, not with any other key), and found I did see both of my bootable drives come up as choices. Unfortunately, trying to boot from what I *thought* was a good clone on my external drive (firewire connected), resulted in a momentary Apple logo/grey screen, and then the circle w/line through it symbol. So, I guess it's a good thing I'm tinkering now, rather than when I have no choice. Thanks!

Mark