Catastrophic Issue with M1 Big Sur 11.2. A Total Nightmare

ben1257sb wrote:

But they told me it’s not possible to boot an M1 this way

You'd have to ask them why they told you something like that. I and several others on this forum boot into our external M1 boot drives everyday.

I wrote an article that explains how to make a M1 boot drive. You can find it here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252222611

Please post any questions regarding this process in that particular thread, so that this community can learn along with you.

You should be able to do this with your internal drive too. If memory serves me right you need to format it differently and then install macOS 11.1 via a flash drive. There is a line of code that you need to paste into terminal, or it won't work. If you need it I can hunt it down for you.

Haven't forgotten about this. Having a hard time finding 11.1 download, but I might have found 11.0 (download is simply titled "Big Sur").

What I have learned about making an M1 external boot drive;

• It needs to be a Thunderbolt 3/4 drive. You cannot use a USB-C connector for this. You also cannot use a Type A adapter for a USB 3.0 or later drive. Bottom line, it must be a native Thunderbolt 3 drive or drive enclosure.
• Erase the drive (NVMe works best) and then format it as APFS from the M1. Cannot be formatted by an intel Mac!
• Using a Big Sur installer (via thumbdrive in terminal) install Big Sur from your M1 Mac.

Since you are trying to use your internal drive, I will try to reproduce this method using my internal drive, but ironically I think it's currently at 11.1, so I'll first need to upgrade it to 11.2.1 first, and then reformat it using terminal (disk utility doesn't work for this) before I reinstall 11.1 back onto it. This will be an all day job once I get the 11.1 download, but once I find it I'll document the steps and post them here for you.

You do not have any backup of those files?

If you didn't, it was an accident waiting to happen.

First rule of using any computer for business, minimum

of 3 copies of files on three different devices, the original

and two backup copies. A common phrase is one backup

is no backup at all, since the backup can fail.

I am surprised by this.

OWC, which uses Softraid in their products, advises not to install 11.2; they also say it is EASY to revert to 11.1:

 https://www.softraid.com/how-to-use-snapshots-on-m1-apple-silicon-computers/

ben1257sb wrote:

Sorry buddy but I do have a backup. 2 extra to be exact.

Can't you access your files from your work computer? If not then can't you simply install 11.1 on a different hard drive, and then access the backup files from it?

Also, Time Machine is pretty much designed for such a thing, and don't forget about iCloud.

something about M1 makes it virtually impossible to go back an OS version.

Not virtually impossible, but impossible, and for very good reason!

Your M1 was built and designed to use 11.0.

Big Sur is much different from all other macOS versions. Whatever macOS that ships with a Mac, is that computers base OS. You can always format the hard drive and chose any macOS starting from 11.0 for your Mac, but you will lose files if you don't back them up beforehand. Personally I would just buy another hard drive (as mentioned above) and use that to boot from until this is sorted.

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

One could go back to 11.1, and that appears to be not just possible, but easy, according to OWC.

I don't know about your OWC drive, but I know for a fact that you can go back because I just did it yesterday for my M1 Mac mini. Buy hard drive. Format drive with M1. Install 11.1. Boot from M1 by holding down the power button. Done.

ben1257sb wrote:

Do you know mr Macintosh? He mentions how shooting from a flash drive is not possible.

When I couldn't install 11.1 (even when I tried installing using recovery) I installed it by using terminal.

Using terminal and a flash drive was the only way that I found around this.

If I can find a copy of 11.1, and I have more time this weekend I'll write up a step-by-step for you.

Keep in mind that 11.1 reportedly had a bug where it prevented some users to upgrade to it, so maybe that's one reason you're also having issues. 11.01 may be a better version for you.

Also, be aware that as with many updates there are also

firmware updates that that may be incompatible with

a previous version (perhaps your issue is a firmware one).

How they may or may not affect you depends on your

entire computing "ecosystem".

Rolling back to a previous OS version does not roll back the

firmware changes.