After three months, and three M1 Mac Mini’s, I still cannot boot from an external thunderbolt SSD. Is there a list of functional SSD and enclosures?

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if you check the soft raid forums, the latest non-beta 11.2.X breaks soft raid.
the latest 11.3.x beta seems to be working, so depending on how your
thunder bay 4 mini was configured (JBOD, raid4...) and the state of the OS on the
boot device, things might not be working

i'm waiting for the non-beta 11.3 before i attach our m1 mini to the thunder bay 4 mini (SSD)

Hey, by the way, do you have a link to said forums or posts? If there is a good chance that 11.3 might work for my ThunderBay Drive, I would be interested in trying to sign up for the Beta. I have no use for my computer until I can use my Thunderbolt drive to boot externally, anyway. If I can get in on the beta, I’ll let you know how my experience goes.

 

[lcubed]

G

Hey, by the way, do you have a link to said forums or posts? If there is a good chance that 11.3 might work for my ThunderBay Drive, I would be interested in trying to sign up for the Beta. I have no use for my computer until I can use my Thunderbolt drive to boot externally, anyway. If I can get in on the beta, I’ll let you know how my experience goes.

google Big Sur softraid forum

the reports are the latest 11.3 beta no longer prevents the OWC softraid 6 beta driver from loading. The crystal ball hasn’t clarified the timing for the 11.3 non beta yet

 

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google Big Sur softraid forum

the reports are the latest 11.3 beta no longer prevents the OWC softraid 6 beta driver from loading. The crystal ball hasn’t clarified the timing for the 11.3 non beta yet

Thank you for the response!

Okay, so I signed up for the macOS beta program and I downloaded and installed 11.3 beta on my internal M1 Mini drive and now, when I attempt to boot to one of my external SSD via ThunderBolt 3 OWC ThunderBay Mini 4, I get a different error message. Instead of SDErrorDomain 104, I now get SDErrorDomain 108. One interesting thing is that I get this new error message immediately, whereas it took about five seconds of thinking for my Mini to produce the previous SDErrorDomain 104 error.
Now, I don’t plan to actually use softraid software, but I wonder if there is some kind of driver that I need now from OWC to potentially have more success.

 

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the reports are the latest 11.3 beta no longer prevents the OWC softraid 6 beta driver from loading. The crystal ball hasn’t clarified the timing for the 11.3 non beta yet

Just for fun, I tried to install 11.3 beta on an external SanDisk connected via ThunderBolt 3 (OWC ThunderBay Mini 4), and I did so via internet install in Recovery Mode. I first erased the drive, formatting it as default APFS settings. Immediately, the install progress was half completed and the time remaining read: 2 hours and 58 minutes—very curious. That said, the install took about 30 mins. That said...
Installing the beta 11.3 onto my external ThinderBolt 3 drive worked! Unlike every other precious attempt, the completed installation resulted in a reboot of the Mini into the external SSD to set up the MacOS! Previously, the Mac would reboot, hit a black screen and then reboot again back to the internal!
So to recap, the 11.3 beta Big Sur still kicked an error, albeit a new one (SDErrorDomaim 108) when I attempted to boot an external 11.2.3 Big Sur installation on an external ThunderBolt 3 SSD, but once I wiped, reformatted and installed the 11.3 beta on the external SSD via TB3, external booting worked on the 11.3 beta external drive when booting from the internal 11.3 beta!

Now, does anyone have any tips as far as testing certain things to help me further confirm my long term success? I know that others have encountered issues after they thought they had success, so I will be happy to try and test some stuff to report back.

 

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It's not a roadblock put up by Apple, as others have done this successfully.

It’s people like you and posts like yours that made me sign up to those boards to both ask for help and share my experiences, so I wanted to let you know of my success! I am posting and detailing my experience here in this thread up above and surely with more to come!

 

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so I will be happy to try and test some stuff to report back.

Okay, so the first thing I wanted to test was restarting my Mac from the external boot to see if it would restart back to the external or if it would restart to the External drive. Well, the Mac restarted to the external drive, which is what I had hoped for, but not without some quirks.
Upon a restart to my external SSD, my desktop background was black, but the desktop background image occasionally flashed as being visible. My external hard drives had mounted, and the finder window worked.

Another funny thing is he dock is gone. I can’t I hide it either. I was able to launch Calendar and browse the web on safari though. The flashing desktop image is wildly annoying, haha.

All of the above anomalies persisted after a second reboot from and to the external SSD.

 

[Mac... nificent]

It’s people like you and posts like yours that made me sign up to those boards to both ask for help and share my experiences, so I wanted to let you know of my success!

THANK YOU! I love helping out ?

Upon a restart to my external SSD, my desktop background was black, but the desktop background image occasionally flashed as being visible. My external hard drives had mounted, and the finder window worked.

Another funny thing is he dock is gone. I can’t I hide it either.

Run Disk Utilities and see if that helps fix those things. If it doesn't, then try booting into safe mode.

 

[lcubed]

It's not a roadblock put up by Apple, as others have done this successfully.

that should read as 'it's not a deliberate roadblock', since an error on apple's part broke 11.2.X
which appears to be fixed in the latest 11.3.X beta

 

[Mac... nificent]

that should read as 'it's not a deliberate roadblock'

Yes thank you.