Macbook Pro M1 2021 14 inch. Was running Monterey when I formatted the new drive, then running Ventura when I reformatted the drive and installed Ventura on it.
The connections are:
1. To the power source
2. External drive: LaCie 5TB that was on a list of compatible drives with the M1 Mac.
3. Apple trackpad attached to the Thunderbolt / USB-C port to interact with Apple's onscreen accessibility keyboard. I setup the onscreen keyboard to be available at the login screen at startup over a month ago.
Prior to this: I'd had an issue with the M1 recently, with apps crashing frequently, and a fan noise on shutdown, that seemed to be resolved when I finally did a reinstall of Monterey some time in the last few weeks. It was just a regular reinstall from the recovery disk, I did not erase first. Since then there has been no fan noise whether at shutdown or any other time, and I haven't had any apps crash since.
Steps on Wednesday morning to install Ventura on the LaCie drive: With Disk Utility, formatted the entire LaCie drive as APFS encrypted, GUID. Clicked in System Preferences to install the recommended Ventura upgrade, and clicked the accept license agreement. Usually there is a screen after this where you can select your drive to install the upgrade on, but I didn't see that screen. Instead, the process said it was going to restart, yet there was no button to cancel the install so I could save it for later use, just a button to restart. So, Ventura ended up on the M1 Macbook instead of the new external drive, which turned out all right because the Ventura installation went quickly and after installing seemed to run okay as I clicked around and didn't see any problems.
I then rebooted into recovery mode to install Ventura on the external drive. After selecting reinstall, the external drive was not available as it was encrypted. After reading that encrypted drives cannot be installed with macOS, I reformatted it while still in the recovery drive. This time I only reformatted the volume, not the drive, as APFS without the encryption.
Then I was able to select the newly formatted volume to do the reinstallation. It installed Ventura quickly and after installing I selected the external drive to boot into. Ventura seemed to be working fine on it.
I noticed FileVault was not enabled by default, so I clicked enable. The screen said this will take 6 hours. Looking back at the screen a few moments later, the screen had turned to what looks to be a dynamic screen saver. It has a large flower of varying shades of yellow against a blue sky background, and the scene keeps rotating around the flower petals, some petals are brighter yellow and some towards the bottom of the flower petal are closer to orange.
Since I thought it was a screensaver, I touched the physical keyboard to see if the screensaver would stop, hoping to see a progress bar, but touching the keyboard made no difference. I tried different keys, even very lightly and briefly touching the power button, but no change. The screen is still a moving scene of floating about a large yellow flower.
When I tried to use the external wired trackpad, I noticed the onscreen keyboard was available, and so was the pointer. The only thing the pointer will interact with is the accessibility keyboard. I can drag the accessibility keyboard around the screen, minimize the keyboard, change the size and switch between dark and light styles for the keyboard. I can repeat these tasks with the touchpad of the M1 Macbook, also.
But clicking anywhere else on the screen does nothing to change the background.
The LaCie drive blinks quickly every so often, it flashes too fast to properly count the blinks, but it's approximately 9 to 14 blinks per cycle. So I've been assuming it is being encrypted with FileVault, though there is no status bar telling me if the encrypting is actually taking place or how far along in the process it is.
It has now been over 72 hours with the dynamic screensaver still moving around the yellow flower petals, and the LaCie drive still flashing every so often.
I've been reading about FileVault encrypting taking a long time, especially with large drives, but is this non-interactive screensaver mode normal for this encryption process? Is there any way to get to the progress bar or find out the time left, or has this been done purposely to save energy?
Also, if I remove the connected Apple trackpad while the computer is still in this process of encryption, will that create an issue?
UPDATE: After shutdown, Macbook with no peripherals had trouble booting and so booted to recovery mode. How I got here:
Before shutdown:
Pressing a key on the Macbook's built-in keyboard will highlight that key on the onscreen accessibility keyboard. From the Macbook's built-in touchpad, I can control the pointer on the entire screen, including the screensaver and the accessibility keyboard, and interact with most of the menu items on the onscreen keyboard's menu, excluding the keyboard's settings menu. Was able to get into Dwell and use it to control the onscreen keyboard.
Bluetooth is active because next I unplugged the wired trackpad but was still able to use it to position the pointer onscreen. Then I turned off bluetooth on the trackpad and lost access. When I switched bluetooth on the trackpad, it reconnected and allowed me use of the pointer again.
I tried a few methods I read online for exiting the screensaver such as Command Control Q, Command Shift Q, closing the lid for 15 seconds.
Shutdown and attempt to reboot:
I had shut it down by pressing the power button for about a count of 10. Let it sit over an hour. Removed the LaCie external. Only connection is to the power source. Let it sit several hours.
Pressed power button.
Saw progress bar with apple logo start and move normally at first, then it slowed and stopped.
Then it switched to a black screen with apple logo without the progress bar for a second.
Then switched to another black screen with apple logo with the progress bar. The progress bar began to move for a second.
Then it booted to recovery partition. It says Macintosh HD on the left and Options on the right. The accessibility keyboard is available.
After a few min, it went into sleep mode or at least it went black and then woke up when I touched the space bar.
Not sure what to do next. The majority of my files were recently backed up, but I'd like to save the few files I made after it, before proceeding and possibly losing them. Safest way to do that?
The connections are:
1. To the power source
2. External drive: LaCie 5TB that was on a list of compatible drives with the M1 Mac.
3. Apple trackpad attached to the Thunderbolt / USB-C port to interact with Apple's onscreen accessibility keyboard. I setup the onscreen keyboard to be available at the login screen at startup over a month ago.
Prior to this: I'd had an issue with the M1 recently, with apps crashing frequently, and a fan noise on shutdown, that seemed to be resolved when I finally did a reinstall of Monterey some time in the last few weeks. It was just a regular reinstall from the recovery disk, I did not erase first. Since then there has been no fan noise whether at shutdown or any other time, and I haven't had any apps crash since.
Steps on Wednesday morning to install Ventura on the LaCie drive: With Disk Utility, formatted the entire LaCie drive as APFS encrypted, GUID. Clicked in System Preferences to install the recommended Ventura upgrade, and clicked the accept license agreement. Usually there is a screen after this where you can select your drive to install the upgrade on, but I didn't see that screen. Instead, the process said it was going to restart, yet there was no button to cancel the install so I could save it for later use, just a button to restart. So, Ventura ended up on the M1 Macbook instead of the new external drive, which turned out all right because the Ventura installation went quickly and after installing seemed to run okay as I clicked around and didn't see any problems.
I then rebooted into recovery mode to install Ventura on the external drive. After selecting reinstall, the external drive was not available as it was encrypted. After reading that encrypted drives cannot be installed with macOS, I reformatted it while still in the recovery drive. This time I only reformatted the volume, not the drive, as APFS without the encryption.
Then I was able to select the newly formatted volume to do the reinstallation. It installed Ventura quickly and after installing I selected the external drive to boot into. Ventura seemed to be working fine on it.
I noticed FileVault was not enabled by default, so I clicked enable. The screen said this will take 6 hours. Looking back at the screen a few moments later, the screen had turned to what looks to be a dynamic screen saver. It has a large flower of varying shades of yellow against a blue sky background, and the scene keeps rotating around the flower petals, some petals are brighter yellow and some towards the bottom of the flower petal are closer to orange.
Since I thought it was a screensaver, I touched the physical keyboard to see if the screensaver would stop, hoping to see a progress bar, but touching the keyboard made no difference. I tried different keys, even very lightly and briefly touching the power button, but no change. The screen is still a moving scene of floating about a large yellow flower.
When I tried to use the external wired trackpad, I noticed the onscreen keyboard was available, and so was the pointer. The only thing the pointer will interact with is the accessibility keyboard. I can drag the accessibility keyboard around the screen, minimize the keyboard, change the size and switch between dark and light styles for the keyboard. I can repeat these tasks with the touchpad of the M1 Macbook, also.
But clicking anywhere else on the screen does nothing to change the background.
The LaCie drive blinks quickly every so often, it flashes too fast to properly count the blinks, but it's approximately 9 to 14 blinks per cycle. So I've been assuming it is being encrypted with FileVault, though there is no status bar telling me if the encrypting is actually taking place or how far along in the process it is.
It has now been over 72 hours with the dynamic screensaver still moving around the yellow flower petals, and the LaCie drive still flashing every so often.
I've been reading about FileVault encrypting taking a long time, especially with large drives, but is this non-interactive screensaver mode normal for this encryption process? Is there any way to get to the progress bar or find out the time left, or has this been done purposely to save energy?
Also, if I remove the connected Apple trackpad while the computer is still in this process of encryption, will that create an issue?
UPDATE: After shutdown, Macbook with no peripherals had trouble booting and so booted to recovery mode. How I got here:
Before shutdown:
Pressing a key on the Macbook's built-in keyboard will highlight that key on the onscreen accessibility keyboard. From the Macbook's built-in touchpad, I can control the pointer on the entire screen, including the screensaver and the accessibility keyboard, and interact with most of the menu items on the onscreen keyboard's menu, excluding the keyboard's settings menu. Was able to get into Dwell and use it to control the onscreen keyboard.
Bluetooth is active because next I unplugged the wired trackpad but was still able to use it to position the pointer onscreen. Then I turned off bluetooth on the trackpad and lost access. When I switched bluetooth on the trackpad, it reconnected and allowed me use of the pointer again.
I tried a few methods I read online for exiting the screensaver such as Command Control Q, Command Shift Q, closing the lid for 15 seconds.
Shutdown and attempt to reboot:
I had shut it down by pressing the power button for about a count of 10. Let it sit over an hour. Removed the LaCie external. Only connection is to the power source. Let it sit several hours.
Pressed power button.
Saw progress bar with apple logo start and move normally at first, then it slowed and stopped.
Then it switched to a black screen with apple logo without the progress bar for a second.
Then switched to another black screen with apple logo with the progress bar. The progress bar began to move for a second.
Then it booted to recovery partition. It says Macintosh HD on the left and Options on the right. The accessibility keyboard is available.
After a few min, it went into sleep mode or at least it went black and then woke up when I touched the space bar.
Not sure what to do next. The majority of my files were recently backed up, but I'd like to save the few files I made after it, before proceeding and possibly losing them. Safest way to do that?
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