Instead, try restoring from the container instead, which should then recreate the Volume Group together. Selecting the disk will inevitably fail because you can only restore to a disk with an identical name, it would appear. If you ever decide to use Disk Utility’s Restore feature, you must be careful what you select as the item from which you want to restore.
Choose a boot drive mac software#
Knowing that Big Sur’s software restore feature had been fixed for the 11.0.1 release, I thought I might be able to use that via Disk Utility to restore my current boot volume to the external disk. Next, after updating to Big Sur 11.1, I tried cheating. The System and Data volumes were present and appeared to be correct, although the diskutil apfs list command didn’t pass comment on whether the System volume was sealed, which seems puzzling. Although I could see and select it in the Startup Disk pane, Big Sur 11.0.1 couldn’t be booted from there.Ĭhecking the external disk gave no clues as to what was wrong. Some who have attempted this using an M1 have reported that the installation never completes thankfully mine was completely successful until I tried to restart from it. The most obvious method of doing this is to run the Big Sur installer app, and select a freshly formatted external drive as its destination. This has become more complicated with the advent of the T2 chip and its secure boot, but one of the advantages of the M1 Macs, so we thought, was their ability to boot from a sealed system on an external disk without having to alter security settings. If your Mac won’t start up properly from its internal disk, you may well be able to get it up and running from your external disk, which you can keep armed with diagnostic and repair tools for such emergencies. It’s been one of the favourite recovery tools for many Mac users going back for more than a couple of decades. There are plenty of good reasons for wanting an external bootable disk, of course.
(Note that this isn’t about creating a bootable installer for Big Sur, which is widely documented now.)
Choose a boot drive mac how to#
I wish this article could explain how to do it successfully, but like many other M1 owners, all that I’ve tried so far has failed. If your Mac happens to be one of the new M1 models, then you may find this tricky, or even impossible. It’s one of those commonplace tasks: installing a bootable version of macOS on an external disk.