Big Sur bootable clone on SSD does not work

Question

Created May ’21

Replies 2

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Hi all,
I have formatted my Mac mini and reinstalled Big Sur. Then, I cloned it on my 500GB SSD drive in order to boot from there because it works faster with Xcode and Swift programming.
Unfortunately the booting process does not work.
I had dual boot with Catalina and it worked like a charm. Now, when I press the "Option" button during startup, nothing happens and it goes straight to Mac mini.
I used Carbon Copy Cloner.
Can anyone please give me a solution because I am stuck!
Thank you in advance,
Nikos

Answered by sugarakis in 675739022

Hi granada29,

Thank you for your reply.
I finally got it working earlier today by downloading the Big Sur installer software and installing it on the SSD.
I ran the Terminal command "softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer" and after it completed it asked me where I wanted to install it.
I chose my external SSD Drive and at the end I could finally see under "System Preferences" , "Startup Disk" both options:
My Mac Mini HD and the External SSD. By selecting the SSD as a boot option, everything worked great!

I hope this might be helpful to others having the same issue with mine.

Take care,
Nikos

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Answer 1

granada29 OP

May ’21

By default CCC will only do a clone of the Big Sur data volume. I suspect that you have not made a bootable backup, i.e. also including the system volume. The CCC web-site has details on how to make a bootable backup with CCC running on Big Sur.

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Answer 2

sugarakis OP

May ’21

Accepted Answer

Hi granada29,

Thank you for your reply.
I finally got it working earlier today by downloading the Big Sur installer software and installing it on the SSD.
I ran the Terminal command "softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer" and after it completed it asked me where I wanted to install it.
I chose my external SSD Drive and at the end I could finally see under "System Preferences" , "Startup Disk" both options:
My Mac Mini HD and the External SSD. By selecting the SSD as a boot option, everything worked great!

I hope this might be helpful to others having the same issue with mine.

Take care,
Nikos

0