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M1 Macs, boot from external drive possible?
- Thread starter sledgehammer89
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I am going to have to withdraw this. I just now tried to do a new install onto a Samsung T5, and while the installation appears to complete, my M1 MBA won't boot from it.
My previous statement about successfully installing and booting from Samsung T5 was based on several successful installs a couple of months ago. Since then there have been firmware and macOS updates and it doesn't seem to work currently.
I am now checking whether I can install and boot from a Thunderbolt external or whether that has been affected too.
My impression of the whole subject of external booting on M1 Macs is that different things work for different people at different times!
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Most times, the drive last a lot longer than the original owner keeps the Mac.
Using an external drive to boot from daily, is rather impractical and unnecessary. In my opinion, there isn't much point in buying tech line isn't going to use it for fear of it wearing out. We are supposed to be consumers not collectors of Mac.
Installing and booting from Thunderbolt 3 still works, so what Winna wrote in post#90 seems currently to be true (but wasn't two months ago)....on my data point of one.
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I'd have to disagree. When my M1 boots into my external drive there are no indications that it's an external. Takes like 5 seconds to boot to the desktop. The entire process is invisible. It just saves people a ton of money so they don't have to pay the Apple tax on the larger Apple internal drive.
I think this is probably true for an external Thunderbolt drive but less true for an external USB drive (although many do it). The system sees external Thunderbolts drives as equivalent to internal, eg for TRIM and SMART, which it doesn't for USB. Also external TB drives can be nearly as fast as the internal drive.
Booting daily from an external is OK for a M1 Mini, but makes little sense for a portable Mac unless you never move it.
Yes, I should have mentioned for my comment above that it pertains to a Mac mini.
Would be hard to use always use an external with a Macbook unless you used a lot of duct tape
I managed to get an external USB3 enclosure (Inateck FEU3NS-1) with SSD to boot on an M1 Mac mini.
By downloading Big Sur 11.2.2 via the App Store, and installing by selecting the external drive, formatted as APFS with no encryption.
Everything works as expected with the drive set as the startup volume.
When I enable FileVault and the process completes, I can continue to use the Mac mini, put the Mac to sleep, wake up etc.
As soon as I restart or shutdown and startup, the Mac mini never boots and presets the boot menu.
I have attempted reducing security, but this doesn't help. I can successfully do this for the internal drive, but not the external.
Is there an issue with FileVault and external drives on M1?
By downloading Big Sur 11.2.2 via the App Store, and installing by selecting the external drive, formatted as APFS with no encryption.
Everything works as expected with the drive set as the startup volume.
When I enable FileVault and the process completes, I can continue to use the Mac mini, put the Mac to sleep, wake up etc.
As soon as I restart or shutdown and startup, the Mac mini never boots and presets the boot menu.
I have attempted reducing security, but this doesn't help. I can successfully do this for the internal drive, but not the external.
Is there an issue with FileVault and external drives on M1?
I have just repeated what failed this morning and it worked ! Installed and booted onto USB Samsung T5 using a bootable USB flash drive.
Thanks mac-nificent. It isn’t possible to use FileVault then?
Thanks gogogo2, I’ll try reinstalling, but I don’t think it will allow me as the drive will now be encrypted.
However I was unable to reduce security on the external drive, either via the gui or via terminal, only the internal drive. Do I need to disable security on the external drive also?
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And that working external drive may not execute as a bootable when you really need it to. That is a problem for me. I thought about testing different things but with the process still being so flaky 1 attempt to another, I am going to wait some more until things get more stable like we have become accustomed to with the previous CCC bootable drives.
You may be right about it not working when needed, but what I can say is that I have had a Thunderbolt external for about ten weeks which I boot from regularly and has always worked. I have also not had any install failures with Thunderbolt, even today when USB wasn't working. From my experience and other comments I do believe Thunderbolt is more reliable and consistent for external booting.
I will look into a Thunderbolt external. At the moment, all I have are USB and a couple of USB-C.
it not need to reduce security on external drive, just install macOS in recovery, it will boot straight,
+1 ?
For now Thunderbolt 3 is the best way to go.
If you have a Thunderbolt 3 drive (or enclosure) then I would try this method first. Takes only 20 minutes (instead of over 2 hours) and boots right to the desktop;
Making an M1 External Boot SSD in 20 Minutes...
Will be interesting to see how many people succeed with your method or with bootable flash using USB externals....not many based on my tests today!......OTOH varying experiences seem to be the the name of game.
forums.macrumors.com
I got it to boot using this method, but as soon as I reboot after enabling FileVault, it doesn’t boot any more?
Same for me... still buggy and also disturbs my original internal boot proces.
it make sense, apple think external ssd isn't safe, FileVault need high level safety, you only choose one from external ssd and FileVault ,
What has worked for me under Big Sur 11.2 is the following:
* use Disk Utility to format a TB3 SSD. I use OWC Envoy Pro EX Or FX.
* Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy Macintosh HD to the newly APFS formatted SSD.
* Restart while holding down power button.
* In recovery mode install Big Sur to the above SSD.
* Boot from above SSD, if necessary by holding down power button while restarting.
* Select above SSD to boot from. Go for it.
My hope is this will continue to work for new updates to Big Sur.
* use Disk Utility to format a TB3 SSD. I use OWC Envoy Pro EX Or FX.
* Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy Macintosh HD to the newly APFS formatted SSD.
* Restart while holding down power button.
* In recovery mode install Big Sur to the above SSD.
* Boot from above SSD, if necessary by holding down power button while restarting.
* Select above SSD to boot from. Go for it.
My hope is this will continue to work for new updates to Big Sur.
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If I put the SSD into a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, would a bootable FileVault Big Sur install be possible then?
It's not about the enclosure. It is about security not allowing the FV boot.
Great questions.
I don't know.
I haven't used FileVault.
Also I have not tried to install in an SSD in a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.
The latter may depend on the type of SSD used.
Please try it out and let us know. Thanks.