Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/22/booting-an-m1-mac-from-an-external-disk-it-is-possible/

by alwillis • 6 years ago

118 86 6 years ago

willvarfar• 6 years ago

Back a couple of years ago I messed up my MBP by partitioning it to dual-boot Linux.

At the time Linux desktops didn't cope with retina screens very well (and probably still don't?), but it was worth it for my code-heavy days. But I still went back into OSX for Skype-for-Business calls (shudder).

For ages I was very happy Linux-on-MBP user.

And then OSX refused to upgrade to the next major version because the ssd was partitioned.

So I'm kinda wary of ever doing any stunt like partitioning the internal ssd again in the future.

But reading about dual-boot from external SSD makes me think "when I get my M1, perhaps I can boot Linux from an external SSD". That way I can still use OSX for the MS Office Suite when the web-version isn't cutting it, kinda thing.

But is there any signing requirement for the external ssd boot-up?

pault• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure most Linux desktop environments these days have decent support for UI scaling. Last time I tried it worked well if your dpi was close to an integer multiple of 96. And if external boot works well with the M1 Macs, a thunderbolt enclosure with an m.2 drive would be pretty darn fast.

sneak3• 6 years ago

You can disable the signing requirement, but it is unlikely that there will be Linux drivers for the M1's GPU any time soon.

I imagine the first person getting Linux booting at all (even without graphical acceleration) on the M1 will be at the top of HN.

sa1• 6 years ago

Might be this person: https://www.patreon.com/marcan/posts

alwillis3• 6 years ago

Apple support document on turning off secure boot: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208198

rangibaby• 6 years ago

When was that? I dual booted my MBP from 2015 or 16. UI scaling worked fine with a few exceptions using Ubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME.

And then OSX refused to upgrade to the next major version because the ssd was partitioned.

IIRC with some MacOS update it got confused when it rebooted while installing, holding alt and choosing the correct partition while rebooting got it back on track.

jhanschoo2• 6 years ago

I've been booting Linux regularly from an external SSD since ~2016. This was after I encountered the same bs you did with it installed in an internal drive: I think I lost data when OS X upgrades first introduced logical partition containers in anticipation of APFS, and again when APFS was introduced.

Starting this year I no longer use Apple devices, since everything work-related I do in Linux.

simonh• 6 years ago

I was using boot camp through that whole period and don’t think I lost a byte. I had time machine backups anyway. Maybe I used time machine restores as part of the migration though, I can’t remember.

PurpleFoxy2• 6 years ago

Just so you know, you can always recover this kind of thing by booting while holding cmd + r and then formatting the drive and reinstalling.

adrian_b• 6 years ago

If you had problems with retina screens a couple of years ago, that was probably due to the drivers for the MBP GPU, not due to monitor resolution or due to Linux.

There are more than 5 years since I do not use monitors with less than 4k resolution with Linux and I never had any problems with correct scaling or with anything else.

While the NVIDIA drivers are not open-source, nevertheless they usually have the best Linux support and they have no problems with multiple high-resolution monitors. However, Apple does not use NVIDIA, so that increases the chances for problems on Linux.

For the smaller MBPs, with Intel Iris GPUs, the GPU drivers should also have been OK, even a couple of years ago.

The greatest chances of problems would have been on MBPs with AMD GPUs. Nevertheless, the AMD drivers have been improving during the last years, so today there should be better chances that they would work OK.

foldr• 6 years ago

And then OSX refused to upgrade to the next major version because the ssd was partitioned.

Apple pretty clearly don't mind you partitioning the SSD because you need to do that for bootcamp, which is supported (for Intel Macs at least). I'm not sure exactly what issue you had, but it's not a case of Apple saying "no, you can't do that".

gattr• 6 years ago

Regarding display scaling: it's been working well for me in Fedora (X-Window + KDE) for a few years now, on a 13.3" FullHD laptop (scale set to 118%) and a workstation with 4K 24" monitor (scale 175%). Just had to manually increase mouse cursor size and set the "Force font DPI" value higher.

2349898ff• 6 years ago

So a really expensive, premium computer supports a feature nearly all budget computer brands do. ("Why did we remove the headphone jack? Courage.")

m463• 6 years ago

Target disk mode and it's cousin, target display mode are two things I believe are 100% good.

They have made macs completely easy to install, upgrade, and repair over my years of experience.

If these kinds of things are disappearing in the iosification of things it will be a real shame.

jeffbee• 6 years ago

Yeah, I'm personally skeptical that the recovery-mode SMB disk sharing is a practical replacement for target disk mode. The last time I had to use target disk mode was when the macOS Mojave installer corrupted my fusion drive, in such a way that the host would panic on boot. I was able to save it with target disk mode and a second mac. That machine was not able to enter its own recovery mode, so I don't see how it could have been repaired with this new SMB scheme.

sneak3• 6 years ago

It is not, however, possible to wipe the disk completely and boot from external media on M1/T2 and reinstall without internet access and obtaining an activation signature from Apple:

https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware...

mhh__2• 6 years ago

Ridiculous - especially considering how expensive they are. It needs regulation, even ignoring the consumers, all these verification/ always-online designs create unusable software or e-waste as the years pass by.

lock-free2• 6 years ago

Buy from a competitor then

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

You can just turn off signature verification, can you not?

sneak3• 6 years ago

This is for activation, not boot security.

The online activation happens after the Recovery kernel is already booted from the installer USB.

strogonoff• 6 years ago

Very informative write-up. Claiming that the removal of the police mapping app was mandated by CCP is a leap, though.

I have no doubt that this is a walled garden dilemma where the gardener is held responsible if an app is seemingly used to cause damage. However, the claim that the gardener was influenced by an oppressive power doesn’t hold water given facts available and my personal observations[0].

It’s true that the level of trust required makes Apple hardware unsuitable for users with extremely heightened security needs. However, for the more casual user, trusting Apple is undoubtedly a more reliable bet than trusting their own infosec faculties.

I’d be happy to be proven wrong or given some other example as to why Apple should not be trusted.

[0] First, if they were, one would assume that (A) the app would not have been reinstated in App Store a couple days later, and (B) E2E-encrypted messengers such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram would have been taken off HK App Store, as groups there were used as the source of much more up-to-date information.

Second, considering the political split I have personally witnessed within Hong Kong population itself, a significant portion of citizens likely reported this app to Apple at their own volition.

On a more sentimental note, I was on location at the time and have seen first hand the destruction of property (such as breaking into and destroying ground-floor storefronts and bank branches) when the police were known to be away. It is far from clear to me that those were in fact actions of honest pro-democracy protesters. All protesters I know personally (about a dozen or so) either condemned those actions or were unable to explain what they were aiming to achieve. Meanwhile, the events seemed to obviously play into CCP’s hand, alienating more politically neutral HKers from the freedom movement, and later used by Beijing as an excuse to force the new “security” law on Hong Kong.

Bear in mind that genuinely peaceful pro-democracy protests—attended by many thousands of people—did not require police evasion apps.

Yetanfou• 6 years ago

What happens when Apple decides the hardware is 'out of support' due to being 'too old'? When they stop providing the signature it will no longer be possible to restore a hosed system, no matter what OS you intend to install.

nyuszika7h• 6 years ago

From experience with iOS, this probably won't happen. Apple continues to sign the last ever released firmware version even for long obsolete devices like the iPhone 3GS.

But if they did decide to stop signing all versions for some reason, you'd be probably right. T2 is vulnerable to checkm8 so there may be a chance to get around it there, but M1 is not vulnerable.

cosmotic3• 6 years ago

I know it's off topic but oh my does big sur look terrible; Those dialog boxes look appalling. Stacked buttons? centered text? 5-word-wide columns?

lisper• 6 years ago

Apple's new design philosophy seems to be: if it's good enough for your phone, it's good enough for your laptop.

dannyw• 6 years ago

It’s not designed for you and me. It’s designed for the growing population whose first and only computer has been an iPhone.

cosmotic3• 6 years ago

It's looked bad on iPhones since the first iPhone.

alwillis3• 6 years ago

It’s designed this way because we can’t have nice things.

It’s been too easy to mess things up by repartitioning the hard drive and installing a different OS.

The M1 is blazing fast; I imagine by the time the pro versions ship with 32 or 64 Gb of RAM and more high performance cores, running Linux in a VM on Apple Silicon Macs should be a solved problem.

burnthrow• 6 years ago

Why do this

mypalmike2• 6 years ago

I guess I'm just not sensitive to terrible UI. Seems ok to me, particularly for uncommonly accessed recovery dialogs.

People make a big deal about UI changes between MacOS versions ("Oh god, now there are flat, rounded icons!" or whatever) and I suspect most users don't even notice anything's different at all.

cosmotic3• 6 years ago

This is the new global standard look for dialog boxes.

I notice. I trip up for months. People build muscle memory and habit. It's not just a style thing, it's a psychology, human nature, and science thing. These are fundamentals of human computer interaction that Apple has lost touch with.

S_A_P• 6 years ago

I generally feel that Big Sur is much more cohesive and consistent in daily use vs Catalina and generally easier on the eyes. There are some UI missteps but I like it.

toyg2• 6 years ago

Neither Big Sur, Catalina, or Mojave, are as good and consistent as anything in the "big cats" series. Apple's UI quality has been steadily declining since Maverick.

tomaskafka• 6 years ago

It is, but on the other side, the hatred for small displays (like my Macbook 12) is apparent. Every toolbar is just thick and huge, because on 20+" retina no one cares anymore.

bluedino2• 6 years ago

Reminds me of Gnome 3 in a bad way...

eyelidlessness• 6 years ago

I haven’t used it yet so I can’t comment on the full experience, but from screenshots I’ve seen it’s very mixed. The updated window/toolbar designs look fantastic to me, though the lower contrast between foreground/background windows is a disappointment. The dialog boxes do often look that bad, but some look much more like their pre-11 counterparts. The rounded corner main menus look super weird but I suspect that’s one that will feel normal after some use. Many of the icons look great (and better than their iOS counterparts), some look just awful.

That said, every large visual overhaul in macOS/OS X has been followed by several iterations of refinement, and I don’t doubt this one will too. I expect by 13 or so the design will be more mature. Lately I’ve tended to skip an OS upgrade and this one doesn’t offer me much to compel me to change that, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they refine in 12.

gmac• 6 years ago

Wholly subjective, but I agree: a few weeks in and I still really don't like it. I particularly dislike the way menus look now. Horizontal margins (there and elsewhere) seem to have been shrunk in a way that to me looks mean and unbalanced.

byecomputer• 6 years ago

far in the future, distant peoples sifting through sand to find the one with the key to plenty: the Apple cryptographic signature

perryizgr82• 6 years ago

Why should a computer care if you are booting from an internal or an external disk? Both a just disks, as long as the data is how the bootloader/OS expects, why wouldn't it boot?

monsieurbanana• 6 years ago

Welcome to the real world where real companies have very real desires of making you fight for every inch of freedom.

PurpleFoxy2• 6 years ago

Because this is something that apple would have had to specifically develop and test and it’s a feature that almost no one uses so it’s quite realistic that they would have not bothered.

Under the same line of logic we should be able to boot an iPhone off an external drive since it’s technically just as capable.

perryizgr82• 6 years ago

Under the same line of logic we should be able to boot an iPhone off an external drive since it’s technically just as capable.

True, I would expect that.

dehrmann• 6 years ago

Imagine seeing an article on how to boot a modern Dell/Lenovo/HP laptop off an external disk.

userbinator• 6 years ago

Apple does like to hide things very well, I remember a long time ago (but after they had switched to x86, and all the news about Hackintoshing had me believe they were just branded PCs) I was asked to do some basic troubleshooting on a Macbook and spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the key to enter the BIOS setup utility, only to find out later that there was none.

Meanwhile, my no-name Chinese mobo exclaims "Press F10 for BOOT MENU!!" (the uppercase and exclamation marks are verbatim) on its BIOS post screen, and nearly all the other PCs I've used have similar if less exciting messages. But with Apple, all you get is an Apple logo, and if you need to do anything other than normal boot, you had better have looked it up because it won't tell you.

chrizel• 6 years ago

Apple just didn't adapt the old IBM PC legacy BIOS after switching to Intel in 2005. [1] Instead, they adapted Intel's EFI [2] which is meant to replace the legacy BIOS. Now you could argue why Apple didn't provide legacy BIOS support like other motherboard manufacturers do today. [3] But I think it conforms to Apple's thinking to not adapt old or unnecessary technology in the first place, and fairly quickly dropping support for older technology. This can be seen in Apple's hardware decisions by being one of the first companies to use USB in the first iMac in the late 90s, dropping disk drives and other ports, etc. and in their software decisions by dropping old APIs or 32-bit fairly quickly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

3: Well, they added BIOS compatibility later, to allow booting OSes like Windows, but what's missing is some fancy GUI around it - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

ramraj07• 6 years ago

No gun to any head, you can choose between crappy ten kilo legtop pc with 30 min battery life and in built skin toaster that lets you easily dual boot and a closed down system that works as it should for 95% of people its intended for.

Not saying Apple has to do it the way it's doing everything to also innovate things like M1, but whatever happened to capitalistic society?

ekianjo• 6 years ago

You have probably not used a recent laptop pc for a while.

hans1729• 6 years ago

From someone who uses a newest gen xps for work (and an mba privately): that's just comparing apples and oranges at this point. Apple is not in the "Laptop" game, Apple is playing their own game. And good on them, because a lot of the amazing advantages that come with macbooks wouldn't be possible otherwise.

This may seem frustrating from a hackers perspective, but it is what it is.

Someone• 6 years ago

You definitely would, if those manufacturers released hardware that was so different from what they shipped before. Hey, you can even google them for current hardware. Examples:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/726938/how-to-boot-from-a-us...

https://www.ubackup.com/articles/lenovo-boot-from-usb-window...

supernova87a2• 6 years ago

Would anyone mind explaining the benefit of doing this (or is it a vulnerability)?

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

You have a big external SSD and you want to put macOS on it. Now you can and your M1 Mac will run off of that.

zachberger2• 6 years ago

right, but why?

fartcannon• 6 years ago

I don't understand: is this a computer or a game console/cell phone?

Why is it news that it can be installed on a disk? That is a fundamental aspect of an OS.

oblio• 6 years ago

I don't understand: is this a computer or a game console/cell phone?

It's both. Macs started as quite closed systems, were opened up a bit near the brink of bankruptcy and now are slowly being turned into appliances a la iPhone but with a small sandbox for app developers.

uniqueid• 6 years ago

It's a web browser, a media player, and a vehicle to sell iCloud subscriptions.

toyg2• 6 years ago

Don't forget "an iOS development kit". But yeah, that's about it.

jbirer• 6 years ago

I love MacOS but I have decided to boycott Apple for the time being. I want full control over my device.

mjhagen• 6 years ago

I'm afraid "for the time being" is going to be "for ever" then.

peteretep• 6 years ago

I want full control over my device

That’s a noble goal, but I thought virtually all computers these days had some form of TEE?

haunter2• 6 years ago

I wonder how far away is the consolification of Macs

- The unified hardware is already there

- One single OS (which pretty much can be invisible)

- The only thing left is the software space. You can still install unverified apps but how long? Just require the App Store for everything and it's pretty much done. And I bet most people would love this (more safe!) or doesn't really care.

legulere• 6 years ago

There’s still a lot of vertical integration possible in hardware. The cpu and gpu is now Apple‘s design, but a lot of components like the screen are just bought from suppliers.

haunter2• 6 years ago

I mean Sony and Microsoft also buying the components from CPU to GPU, that's not even the point

coldtea• 6 years ago

I therefore recommend that you don’t waste your time discovering which USB-C SSDs might be compatible: go straight for a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.

Why would one "waste time"? This information is, or will soon be, all around various forums.

And if its indeed a bug, it will be fixed in an upcoming update, so it doesn't make sense to forke for a (more expensive) TB3 enclosure if a USB-C will do.

Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk

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