It then tried again, and again, until I forced the Mac to shut down by holding the Power button in. The M1 Mac started to boot from the external disk, before the display went black for a while. This didn’t work at all, as each attempt to start up from 11.1 on the external disk resulted in a boot loop kernel panic. Updating a bootable external disk to 11.2Īs Apple hasn’t provided an update installer for 11.2, the logical way to update an existing bootable 11.1 external disk is to restart from it, and run Software Update.

Trying to restart from the external disk then results in an error. When that finally completes, instead of the Mac restarting from the external disk to complete installation, the installer just quits. At that stage, Activity Monitor reports that is taking lots of CPU, and there’s sustained and intense disk activity for many minutes. The problem occurs at the end of the normal installation phase, when presumably the installer is writing hashes up the Merkle tree, with the installer window claiming that there’s only About a minute remaining.

Using the 11.2 full installer app, the one SSD (Samsung X5) that worked for me before works still, and the SSD which wouldn’t take a bootable installation of 11.1 still won’t oblige.

However, far from 11.2 solving this problem, it actually makes it worse.Īs far as I can tell, macOS 11.2 is no less unreliable at this than was 11.1. Now that Big Sur can be updated to 11.2, I’ve been looking at how that affects external boot disks, and whether it finally enables them all to work.

For others, the macOS installer just can’t do the trick, and a high-quality SSD is left unbootable. Some users seem to have all the luck, and the first external SSD they connect to their M1 Mac works fine with the Big Sur installer, and they don’t look back. When running Big Sur 11.1 on an M1 Mac, making a bootable external disk is entirely unpredictable.

Mac dvd drive not working properly