Update Mac Mini Firmware from thumb drive
I have 10 Mac Minis (late 2014) that are currently on Yosemite that I am wiping and updating to be sold (small business went under...sad story). Anyway I ran the update on the first two using the onboard Recovery Mode from startup and formatted the drive (only offered Mac OS Extended Journaled), downloaded the Big Sur updater, ran it. That worked fine. But with 8 more to do, I tried to save some time...
On the 3rd one I created a bootable USB thumbdrive with the Big Sur update on it. Then I:
- Booted to the USB drive
- Ran Disk Utility and formatted to APFS using a double pass wipe (I had noted the Big Sur update I did on the previous two had automatically reformatted the drive as APFS during the installation, so I followed suit here)
- Rebooted to USB and executed Install macOS Big Sur
- When I select the freshly formatted APFS volume I get this message: "Your Mac needs a firmware update in order to install to this volume. Please select a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume instead."
So, this means somehow using the purely thumbdrive update method, I missed a needed (?) firmware update. So, how can I get the firmware update installed via a thumbdrive? I thought I'd go to the trouble to reformat the drive as Extended, and then see if the Big Sur update would install everything as it did in my two previous updates. But the Disk Utility is now only offering APFS.
So I'm stuck in a catch 22 unless I can get this firmware update on the machine via a thumb drive or some other method. Or does anyone else have any other ideas?
Thanks in advance for whatever help you can lend.
-Tim