Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference to kick off June 10 at 10 a.m. PDT with Keynote address

The Keynote will be available to stream on apple.com, the Apple Developer app, the Apple TV app, and the Apple YouTube channel. On-demand playback will be available after the conclusion of the stream.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Birck Cox Author

Level 2

191 points

M1 MacOS no longer allows external startup boot drives?

That seems to be the case. I've been struggling for a week to create a second, external boot disc for my M1 Mini, without success. The lack of success is in both creating a boot disc and in changing the M1 security settings to accommodate an external boot drive. The "startup disc" preference is still a feature of MacOS System Preferences, whether an auxiliary boot disc can actually be employed or not, but the facility for creating one is, frankly, crippled. I have gone through the process: download macOS Monterey installer, save to Applications, select, erase, reformat external target disc, install--over and over and over, to no effect at all. What winds up on the target disc is clearly inadequate, and every time I try to declare such a disc an alternative for "Startup disk", the system tells me that the disk is either damaged or incomplete. It's pretty obvious why, considering that the only folder on the disc that has any contents is "System". The others are empty. So I ask you, where is this mysterious "alternate" startup disc supposed to come from? Do I need to go out and buy one from Apple? What's worse, for me, is that none of the usual sources of information-these forums, AppleCare, or the local Apple Store "Genius Bar" can tell me squat about it. I've received either no help or wrong information from all of them. In many of those cases, I had trouble making them (the specialists) understand why I would want to create an external boot drive, i.e., a "Startup disc", in the first place. If they don't get it, If it's such an outlandish notion, then why is that option still available in System Prefs? Is the-granted-more complicated OS designed to restore and repair severely damaged boot drives without necessitating reformatting the disc-is that intended to do away with the need for an alternate startup disc? If a damaged drive were the only circumstances necessitating an alternate boot drive, that would suffice, but there are other reasons for wanting an alternate drive. Apparently that option is no longer available on M1 Macs.

Mac mini, macOS 12.2

Posted on Apr 14, 2022 6:30 AM

Best reply

etresoft

Level 8

47,296 points

Posted on Apr 21, 2022 8:19 AM

CheviotView wrote:

I believe it is still possible to create a bootable macOS installer on a USB stick with Monterey?

It is. Apple explicitly supports this: How to create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

But Apple does say:

These advanced steps are primarily for system administrators and others who are familiar with the command line. You don't need a bootable installer to upgrade macOS or reinstall macOS, but it can be useful when you want to install on multiple computers without downloading the installer each time.

Useful presumably if you somehow accidentally wipe or corrupt your internal drive (assuming that’s possible now).

This would be a job for internet recovery.

The topic at hand is how to permanently boot a Mac from an internal hard drive. It reminds me of the old Comcast "Slowskys" advertising campaign. A couple of sentient turtles use DSL instead of Comcast cable internet because DSL is so much slower. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7oZqgFA-0

I can answer one technical question however. External thunderbolt drives are not like external USB drives. The differences are more than just the cable. Internally, USB drives are attached to the USB bus. In addition to limiting their speed, this limits the metadata, such as SMART statistics, that can be communicated with the disk. Sometimes the operating can't even tell if an external USB drive is an SSD or not.

But to the operating system, Thunderbolt drives are the same as internal drives. Although the Thunderbolt bus is still slower than internal connections, it is faster than even then fastest SSDs. The Thunderbolt bus support all drive metadata. In fact, when I query for SATA or NVMe drives inside EtreCheck, it returns Thunderbolt drives along with internal drives. I have to do extra work to identify Thunderbolt drives as being external. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to be able to boot more easily with an external Thunderbolt drive.

There are some inexpensive Thunderbolt 3 SSDs available. These are bus-powered M.2 SSDs. They are often sealed devices that aren't any more expandable than the internal drive. There are also some very expensive Thunderbolt RAID devices marketed to the professional market. But in between, those super-expandable and inexpensive devices are all USB, and marketed to the PC market. They can be used for external storage, Time Machine backups, but external booting is going to be slow, problematic, and generally painful.

View in context

M1 MacOS no longer allows external startup boot drives?

Similar questions