Recovery on an M1 Mac runs from its own container, which should improve its robustness. It has one simple entry point, and offers a full range of facilities in an integrated environment. It’s a big step forward.
macOS 11
One command, bless, used to do it all, copying boot.efi to the right place and declaring the volume bootable in its header. Where are we with Big Sur and M1 Macs?
How your M1 Mac starts up in the Recovery mode of your choice, or when it decides you need to take a trip to Recovery to fix an issue.
macOS 11.4 brought major changes to the way M1 Macs handle external bootable disks. This explains how this works during the boot process.
There’s 1 True Recovery, Fallback Recovery and one other recovery mode. Disambiguation, explanation and how this changed in macOS 11.4.
Soon after Apple started delivering M1 Macs, users found that they couldn’t boot them from external disks. Six months later, this has largely been fixed. What went wrong?
For some, inability to clone to the internal SSD of an M1 Mac seems disastrous. In reality, it could achieve little, and there are better solutions.
macOS 11.4 has finally fixed all the problems with installing current and older macOS on external disks, and booting an M1 Mac from them.
What are a new kernel extension and a private framework doing in macOS 11.4? Here are some details, and suggestions for further research.
Cloning has been a popular way of creating external bootable disks. Now that CCC 6 can make full clones of disks for M1 Macs, is it a solution?
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