I’m running out of space on my Mac mini’s main drive.
And have a spare external drive that I can use as a boot drive: once I’ve installed the OS.
However?
The Sonoma installer — by default — will download be downloaded to my main drive.
How do I either:
Download the app to somewhere else?
Or:
Install the OS from elsewhere?
Mac mini, macOS 14.4
Paul Downie wrote:
The Sonoma installer — by default — will download be downloaded to my main drive.
How do I either:
Download the app to somewhere else?
Or:
Install the OS from elsewhere?
You can't.
As @den.thed already indicated, you need to free up enough space on your main drive for the Installer app. Follow his suggestions about moving your Photos, Music & TV libraries to an external drive. Also move other data to an external drive. Your data is better off on an external drive anyway.
And FWIW, macOS is best left on your internal drive if at all possible, especially if it's an Apple Silicon Mac.
Followup ... for a moment I thought you would be able accomplish this via Terminal using the softwareupdate command. But then I remembered that even doing it that way the installer will be saved to your Applications folder. I don't know any way to redirect it to a different save location.
If you have another Mac available:
Still, it would be best to clear enough space on your mini's internal drive.
Are you running Sonoma on the internal drive now?
Why do you want to use an external as a boot drive? Your question sort of implied that you want to boot from the external instead of the internal drive & use your internal drive for data. That's backwards from normal, especially if your mini is Apple Silicon.
What you need to do, is make more room on your Mac mini's internal drive.
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support
Change where your music files are stored on Mac - Apple Support
Move your iMovie for Mac library - Apple Support
Free up storage space - Apple Support
So the macOS Sonoma Installer can fit into your Mac mini's Applications folder.
Then you open the installer and install the macOS on the APFS formatted external drive.
Use an external SSD as your startup disk … - Apple Community
Basically, @MartinR, I wanted to use an external drive, as I’d run out of space on my main drive: I had 10 gigabytes left on a 256gb drive.
I did manage to talk to Apple about it: and clear a lot of space, thankfully!
How can I install macOS on an external drive, if I have no space for the installer on my main drive?
