Bootable installer won't appear in Recovery on 2020 M1 Mac Mini

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Hands168 Author

Level 1

13 points

Bootable installer won't appear in Recovery on 2020 M1 Mac Mini

I have two bootable installers one for BigSur and and one for Monterey.

The Big Sur installer won't show up in recovery but the Monterey one does.

Both installers have been made following Apple instructions.

The USB for Big Sur was previously used as an installer for Mojave so I know the USB works as an installer.

Big Sur installer shows up in Disk Utility and the drive shows up as 'Install macOS Big Sur' on my desktop.

Any ideas what to do next ?

Mac mini, macOS 13.3

Posted on May 17, 2023 8:01 AM

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Answer 1

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D.I. Johnson

Level 7

22,385 points

May 17, 2023 8:33 AM in response to Hands168

Hands168 wrote:

Thanks for the reply

The Big Sur is to be installed on an external SSD in Recovery.

Others online have installed Big Sur on an external SSD to use with their M1 Mac.

You're welcome. 🙂

Those M1 Macs shipped with Big Sur to begin with, so they qualify to run the OS and thus the Big Sur installer. Your M2 Mac shipped with Ventura. It does not qualify to run Big Sur, nor Monterey, and cannot run those installers.

EDIT– Oh, my! I apparently badly misread your original post. I now see this mini IS an M1 that cannot see the Big Sur installer. My apologies. Okay, so the bit about predated OS... you can disregard that. ☺️ Must get more coffee and bigger glasses!

I suggest you connect that installer to your Mac and launch Disk Utility. Then run the First Aid routine on the device and the volume. Maybe there's some bit of data that need to be corrected.

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