Any settings you change or files you save there won’t be reflected on your primary installation. You can use your Mac as normal, but keep in mind that it’s separate from the installation on your main internal hard drive. This brings up the boot switcher and lets you boot from the external hard drive. This can take fairly long, depending on the speed of your external drive and its connection to your Mac, so it’s best to have a fast hard drive with Thunderbolt, USB-C, or USB 3.0 connections.Īnd that’s it! When Disk Utility is done, you can shut down your Mac and hold down Option when booting it back up. I thought I would just plug it in the M1 and it would work, since it has the same OS version as the internal. I recently bought a 2018-2019 Mac Mini and was using my external SSD just fine with it, but now with the M1 it is having all kinds of connectivity issues. You can also choose an ISO image, but that doesn’t have much use here.Ĭlick “Restore,” and Disk Utility will start the copying process. Hi, I bought the new Mac Mini M1 and would like to use it with a external 1TB SSD. Select your external drive in the sidebar, click “Restore” in the menu, and then select your main drive as the “Restore From” option.
Created a bootable USB drive using createinstallmedia (as explained in Apple’s documentation) and it went well.
If you’d like to keep files synced between a desktop and laptop, expand your storage, or have a bootable backup copy of your system, there’s a hidden feature in Disk Utility that makes it easy.
External boot drive mac mini 2014 pro#
But, if you choose your external drive as the restore target, you can flip that action around and copy files from your main drive to the backup. Here are the steps I took to create the bootable USB drive (I have a Mid-2014 MacBook Pro with Retina Display): Downloaded the latest OS X El Capitan (10.11.3) from the Mac App Store. There are a lot of reasons for wanting to boot from an external drive.