Help with making a bootable drive
Hi Apple Community, tearing what is left of my hair out and hoping that you can help me with creating a bootable external Big Sur drive.
Background: My internal Fusion Drive is unusable. It shows up and accepts data (I did get it to load Big Sur but it runs at a glacial pace.) I have now erased it.
I then successfully installed Big Sur onto a 3TB external HDD connected via Thunderbolt. This has been running well ever since I installed it a couple of weeks ago.
However it is noisy and I want to get better speed, so I bought a 2TB Crucial SSD and my plan is to migrate everything over to this drive and make it my Start Up drive.
Problems (There are a few!)
The main problem is that NONE of my keyboard start-up commands work. Cmd R, Opt Cmd R, Opt, I can’t even start up in Safe Boot using Shift.
I have used a keyboard checker and all keys and key combinations are working fine.
So every time the Mac starts up, it goes directly to the Big Sur startup screen on my Thunderbolt drive, no matter what keys I hold down.
This means that I can’t get the Big Sur Installer to complete its installation onto the 2TB SSD, because as soon as it gets to the Restart part of the process, the Mac just reverts to starting up from the Thunderbolt drive.
I have used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the Thunderbolt Data Volume across to the SSD, and I have downloaded the Big Sur installer into my Applications folder on the Thunderbolt drive so theoretically when I use the installer to install Big Sur onto the SSD, that should make it bootable. 😳
I know that the lack of a working internal drive makes this a very non standard problem, but I am hoping there is someone out there who wouldn’t mind helping me troubleshoot shoot this.
iMac 27″, macOS 11.0