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Installing macOS Big Sur on external drives

K

KevinGrabher

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 29, 2009
117
41
Is anybody else facing issues running 11.2.2 from external drives?

I am trying to install 11.2.2 on an external flash disk.
I have a Samsung DUO Plus and a SanDisk Ultra Dual Drive.

The SanDisk was running Catalina and I tried to update it to Big Sur via the App Store but it get's stuck at "Less than 1 minute remaining".
The Samsung starts failing at some point during install, gives a kernel panic and reboots. That whole process repeats itself until i force the machine to shut down.
Installing Catalina on it works fine. Then updating that to Big Sur again ends in a fail-loop.

The issue occurs on a MacBook Pro 15" 2018 as well as a MacBook Air 2015.
I've downloaded the installer multiple times and tried using the installer on the internal MacBook Pro drive (with success) to rule out issues with the installer-image as well.

---

Solution/Workaround, as of 11.2.3 / April 2021:

Apparently the Big Sur installer has issues with (certain?) flash drives.

I ended up installing 11.2.3 on an external HDD.
Although I also got a kernel panic on the 2nd reboot that occurs during the install, it rebooted and went on to finish the installation without further issues.
I then used CarbonCopyCloner to clone the HDD onto the flash drive and was successfully able to boot and use the system.
 
Last edited:
Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are having trouble with APFS.
Apple needs to fix the problem before we can easily get to bootable backups.
Meanwhile, stick with, ick, Time Machine.
I hope they get this fixed soon, as I've never trusted Time Machine
 
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Partron22 said:
Both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are having trouble with APFS.
Apple needs to fix the problem before we can easily get to bootable backups.
Meanwhile, stick with, ick, Time Machine.
I hope they get this fixed soon, as I've never trusted Time Machine
Click to expand...
I'm not trying to create a bootable backup.
I'm trying to have an external bootable system to take on the go and it fails to install a completely vanilla macOS 10.2.2 without any tools.
 
Is your ext drive HFS+, or has Catalina turned it to APFS? The earlier Systems won't recognize a disk in an APFS container.
 
It already was APFS on Catalina. I also completely deleted and formatted the disks as APFS for the fresh installs.
 
Same problem here with just a regular external drive (not flash). But it continues even after I've disconnected the external drive and tried to reboot both from Recovery and Safe modes.
 
Apparently the Big Sur installer has issues with (certain?) flash drives.

I ended up installing 11.2.3 on an external HDD.
Although I also got a kernel panic on the 2nd reboot that occurs during the install, it rebooted and went on to finish the installation without further issues.
I then used CarbonCopyCloner to clone the HDD onto the flash drive and was successfully able to boot and use the system.
 
don't use HDD and usb flash drive, all those are too slow for Big sur.

I use Samsung T5 1TB SSD, ideally Samsung T7 is best option.
 
ewu said:
don't use HDD and usb flash drive, all those are too slow for Big sur.

I use Samsung T5 1TB SSD, ideally Samsung T7 is best option.
Click to expand...

For a always-in-your-pocket "service" drive a thumb drive can be great option. It's much more compact and there are thumb drives with 400mb/s read speeds.

For an external drive you'd want to actually use as a working system I'd agree that you'd probably want a SSD with proper write speeds (and much better reliability/longer lifetime with heavy use).
 
It’s ridiculous that apple killed the ability for us to make a usb thumb boot drive for utility recovery purposes and the tech press has done nothing to criticize them.

Then again apple is selling people intel machines right now that won’t be able to use new features in macos15 for bs reasons and the tech press has been derail it on that. The press everywhere is just pure crap.
 
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