Running OS on external Hard Drive

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Running OS on external Hard Drive

New to Macs but enjoying my New Mac Mini M2 with 16Gb of ram. Snappy machine. Right out of the box Since I only have 256 GB is storage reformatted and installed Ventura on my external drive. Wanted to do as it has more storage and faster read write speeds. Did that the downloaded apps like Final Cut Pro and my Adobe photo editing apps. Worked with no issues. However when I went to update Final Cut Pro couldn’t do the update due the update not finding the application folder. Is there a way around this. I ended up reformatting and moved ever Back to the internal drive and worked correctly? However due to speed and additional storage would rather use the external drive. Admittedly I am used to PC and with that doesn’t matter what drive files live on.

Mac mini, macOS 14.0

Posted on Aug 30, 2023 9:25 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 30, 2023 10:40 PM in response to Marvinheath

Silicon Macs tend to be picky about booting from an external volume. I do it all the time with an Intel Mac with no issues. But recently when I tried Ventura on a Carbon Copy Cloned (legacy) external volume with MacBook Air 13" M2 (2022) it did not boot while there was no problem with essentially the same workflow and gear with MacBook Pro 16-inch M1 (2021).

I'd boot from the internal and move large files (FCP projects, source files, music etc) to an external SSD formatted as APFS (case insensitive). And make good backups from both volumes either Carbon Copy Cloner or Time Machine or both etc.

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Running OS on external Hard Drive

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