Trying to boot from external "No native mechanism to verify InstallInfo.plist"

[_penny_]

I just bought a new 16" Macbook Pro.
I want to boot from an external drive. I bought this one from Apple: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HLN92ZM/A/sandisk-64gb-ultra-dual-drive-usb-type-c?afid=p238|sEetWoKLA-dc_mtid_1870765e38482_pcrid_407264703102_pgrid_88518032113_&cid=aos-us-kwgo-pla-btb-catchall--slid---product-HLN92ZM/A

I allowed ”booting from external media" in Security Utility.

When I tried to download Catalina in Recovery mode from "Reinstall macOS", the disk was greyed out and showed upon hover "This Mac can only install macOS on APFS-formatted drives. Please use Disk Utility to reformat as APFS."

So I reformatted to APFS. But from there in the Installer Log: -see attached photo-

I stopped it and through Terminal reverted APFS back to HFS+.
I downloaded Catalina from the app store and the 8GB successfully transferred onto the drive. When I tried to choose it as the Startup Disk in System Preferences, "You can't change the startup disk to the selected disk. The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk."
And I was back at "This volume is not formatted as APFS."

What's going on here? I easily performed this on my old Lion different times through Recovery. Why were there errors in the Installer Log?

 

[Taz Mangus]

I downloaded Catalina from the app store and the 8GB successfully transferred onto the drive. When I tried to choose it as the Startup Disk in System Preferences, "You can't change the startup disk to the selected disk. The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk."
And I was back at "This volume is not formatted as APFS."

What's going on here? I easily performed this on my old Lion different times through Recovery. Why were there errors in the Installer Log?

Try this:

• Erase the external drive as APFS.
• Don't restart the computer.
• Run the installer that you download from the Mac App Store, and choose external drive as the destination drive.

If you wanted to boot from the Installer that you download from the Mac App Store, then you would need to create a bootable USB from it.

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

You can use a USB flash drive or other secondary volume as a startup disk from which to install the Mac operating system.

support.apple.com

 

[Honza1]

What's going on here? I easily performed this on my old Lion different times through Recovery. Why were there errors in the Installer Log?

Lots of things which worked in Lion do not work anymore.
May be you should explain what are you trying to achieve by this gymnastics? It is possible that what you are trying to do is no more possible with the new T2 based Macs. Even though, if you want external system drive, that should work fine - I run my 2017MPB (T1 device) from USB-C SSD for few weeks. But I took different route to get that bootable drive - I cloned my internal SSD to external SSD using CCC and left all the heavy lifting to that tool.

 

[_penny_]

Lots of things which worked in Lion do not work anymore.
May be you should explain what are you trying to achieve by this gymnastics? It is possible that what you are trying to do is no more possible with the new T2 based Macs. Even though, if you want external system drive, that should work fine - I run my 2017MPB (T1 device) from USB-C SSD for few weeks. But I took different route to get that bootable drive - I cloned my internal SSD to external SSD using CCC and left all the heavy lifting to that tool.

The problem was I hadn't changed the Secure Boot option in Startup Security Utility to override the T2 chip. After that, it worked perfectly.

Still, thanks for both of your input. I'll stop complaining about Catalina, until I run into something else...