Resolved Can't boot my CCC disk image !

[f62b]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem booting on my Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) disk image.

It all started with me trying to have a look on Big Sur (stuck with catalina), but to prevent damage, I decided to clone my "Macintosh HD" volume and my "BOOTCAMP" volume with CCC on two distinct sparsebundle disk.

I then installed Big Sur but remember I have not saved bunch of things (Music's App playlists, Keychain's wifi password....) so I clone my sparsebundle on an external drive to boot on my old Catalina OS but the drive is not bootable.

How can I make it bootable to recover my things or to restore Catalina with my settings and files if I don't like Big Sur ?

 

[Fishrrman]

I don't think you should be mixing CCC with "sparsebundles".

Make your cloned backup to a drive formatted to APFS -- no sparsebundles.

If you want to clone a bootcamp partition (I've never used one), I think you need something called "WinClone" for that job...

 

[f62b]

That's the thing @Fishrrman I don't know how to "transfer" my cloned backup to a drive formated to APFS. I tried several times with a brand new external hard drive formatted to APFS but never managed to boot on old system.

 

[f62b]

Update: I finally solve the problem.

- First I downloaded the version of macOS I had on my mac with the pretty nice command line on terminal

softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 10.15.7

Mr. Macintosh have a very usuful list on how to downlad any version of macOS and OSX from Lion 10.7 to Monterey 12.

- Then I made a bootable USB drive with the macOS installer with another line comand on terminal

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume
(The command above assumes that you gave the USB key the volume name MyVolume.)

- I installed Catalina on my external hard drive so I can boot on it
- I booted my mac on this new OS
- I mount my old "Macintosh HD" volume from the sparsebundle image I created with CCC
- I opened Migration Assistant, which is in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder and I choosed to migrate my data from the volume I just mounted.
- And yes it worked, now I can boot my old system from an external hard drive