How useful is the traditional panacea of re-installing macOS in Big Sur? And is it worth maintaining an external recovery disk to deal with problems?
recovery
Erase your M1’s internal storage in Recovery, reinstall macOS and you could see an error in which it failed ‘to personalize the software update’. That’s not easy to fix, as explained here.
What would happen to a Mac’s firmware if you installed Monterey beta to its internal or external disk? Could that be reversed?
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.
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.
One command in Terminal which instantly disables any support, and why you can’t (yet) boot your M1 Mac in Linux.
My M1 Mac mini was stuck trying to start up. Its power light was on, but there was no video output, and to all intents it was dead.
How an M1 Mac can start up from an external bootable disk, and how that can fail. All about boot security policy, and how that’s applied.
The Eclectic Light Company 