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Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

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Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#211

Post by amatecha »

funnyflamigo wrote: post #44
GhettoComputers wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever. You can buy common business laptops such as thinkpad and swap the parts easily and cheaply. People aren’t swapping their 2011 i3 for a 2011 i7 if they care about performance; they’re getting an i5 from 2018. None of these swappable parts are unique aside from th…

I disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten fas…

Coincidentally I just bought a ThinkPad X230T this past weekend and it's powered on next to me at this moment! It runs great. I actually bought a couple, and a regular X230. Such nice machines, and very repairable. I am observing the fate of modern computing and trying to get a few easily-repairable machines to hopefully last a long time, rather than weird difficult-to-repair stuff. I have absolutely zero interest in brand new machines that are increasingly locked down with impossible-to-repair and "you don't really own this computer" features.

The X230 was having some weird power/sensor issue so I ordered a replacement motherboard for like $40 CAD in case it dies. It could be years before I need it, but like, this stuff costs peanuts and I am so much more comfortable using a computer I know I can easily maintain (and has excellent performance to boot).

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#212

Post by amatecha »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #129
narraturgy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tangential question. I adore my Thinkpad x230t but it has a whopping ~1 hour battery life at this point. Do you leave yours permanently plugged in or do you have some sort of modern battery solution for our ancient beast with an amazing keyboard?

You can hack the bios to remove the DRM and use 2012 aftermarket batteries, or replace the cells. I dumped my x230, not worth the horribly priced aftermarket (if you break your screen it’s almost as expensive as another laptop and you’ll need to repair it). I love my newer x250 with no DRM for WiFi, 2x SSD slots, cheap batteries that can hotswap, cheaper 1080p IPS replacement screens, and 11hr+ battery life. The x230…

Ah yeah, the unlock to do this is called "1vyrain", right? https://github.com/n4ru/1vyrain/ Friend was telling me about it as he accidentally ordered a non-Lenovo battery and was considering sending it back but also considering trying this "unlock".

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#213

Post by userbinator »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #113

Itt: more corporate sycophants a who have reasons for Apple to deny right to repair to their customers The majority of you work at publicly traded companies and it shows.

Brainwashed propagandists are everywhere. Watch out for them and you may be able to find the truth and the agenda.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#214

Post by kube-system »

Chocola wrote: post #207
notimetorelax wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I don’t understand why people don’t sync their important files to cloud. Dropbox has a free layer that’s perfectly fit for a theses.

Maybe because not everyone likes to share their most important files with a third party? Or because of providers scanning files or stuff like: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

If you seriously consider a state actor to be a threat, then you likely make many other compromises to your ability to conveniently perform disaster recovery.

There is not much overlap between these use-cases:

* I need an easy way to recover my family pictures because I didn't make backups

and

* I have state actors interested in my data

If you really have state actor threats, you probably like that M1 Macs are very hard to perform data-recovery from.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#215

Post by Chocola »

xondono wrote: post #109

I get that for people from IT it sounds surprising, but from a hardware perspective I would say it’s a good change. Instead of having a SPI flash memory with the firmware they’ve gone ahead and merged that into a single flash memory. It’s weird because we are used to see disks as independent modules, but for these devices that’s simply a useless distinction, something that we keep for legacy reasons, not because it p…

There is still a SPI chip from Winbond on board. Also the NVRAM contains variables like "boot-volume". Question is if you can easily change it.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#216

Post by StillBored »

toast0 wrote: post #171
Dylan16807 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many SSDs have you worn out? I've never managed it.

I've had hundreds of enterprise SSDs fail on my servers, but only a couple had any pre-failure indicators in SMART, including write volume which was pretty low. The post-failure indicator was almost consistently no longer visible through the disk controller. Failure rate was much less than enterprise spinning disks, but at least with the spinners failed, you could still see them and get most of the data off, if you n…

If your running that big of a shop, I would call your channel partner/support group and bitch until they figure out whats failing. The usual expected failure modes for SSD's should be that they go into read only mode. If that isn't happening its either a firmware bug (probably) or a controller/vr failure which could be a process/heat/etc type of failure.

Particularly for "enterprise" equipment the expectations isn't that it fails, but that the failures are more graceful and understood.

So complain... that is why your paying the "enterprise" tax.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#217

Post by throw3849 »

djrogers wrote: post #196
throw3849 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

》The primary argument against soldering the SSD, or really any other part, down like this tends to be that "Oh, now you can't just save money by upgrading it yourself|replacing it when it breaks Are you trolling? The primary argument is data recovery. Anything on laptop can die: charging port, motherboard... With soldered ssd your data are gone! You need to resolder SSD into exact same machine type, it may take 5 wee…

Given that the encryption keys for the SSD are stored in the Secure Enclave, moving the SSD elsewhere wouldn't do you any good anyway.

I think that can be disabled, or encryption key exported for backup.

Anyway, it is stupid argument. It is like saying car does not need spare tire, because wheels are welded to save 10 ounces on bolts.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#218

Post by amatecha »

narraturgy wrote: post #53
funnyflamigo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten fas…

This is a tangential question. I adore my Thinkpad x230t but it has a whopping ~1 hour battery life at this point. Do you leave yours permanently plugged in or do you have some sort of modern battery solution for our ancient beast with an amazing keyboard?

Thinking of how the MNT Reform designed their battery solution[0], I wonder if it's possible to build a "battery enclosure" where you can just drop in a bunch of LiFePo4 cells, so you can just purchase commodity batteries. It seems super wasteful to buy a complete new battery every time because it's just the cells inside that lose energy capacity...

[0] https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/parts.html#battery-packs

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#219

Post by GhettoComputers »

amatecha wrote: post #211
funnyflamigo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My thinkpad x230t is still going strong nearly 10 years later (extreme example). With 16GB of ram and an SSD it's still a decently capable machine. If you're the type of person that needs the _fastest_ computer then yeah obviously you're upgrading every year. Or if you work on large codebases, etc. But if you don't care about that, you can easily go 4+ years with your laptop. Yes computers have gotten fas…

Coincidentally I just bought a ThinkPad X230T this past weekend and it's powered on next to me at this moment! It runs great. I actually bought a couple, and a regular X230. Such nice machines, and very repairable. I am observing the fate of modern computing and trying to get a few easily-repairable machines to hopefully last a long time, rather than weird difficult-to-repair stuff. I have absolutely zero interest in…

I highly suggest you return them since the upkeep is very expensive. The repairs for screens is ridiculous, the batteries are horrible (the x220 has more longevity since the bios is DRM free), the cards are on a whitelist (only approved ones allowed). It is so bad I have some that are in disrepair until I can find parts for them again. The x240 to x270 will have modern parts that are cheap, the batteries internal and external are under $30, the screen aren't almost/more than the price of the same laptop. The TN screens on the x230 may not break, but you won't be happy using them, and to modify it with modern parts needs an expensive $60 screen adapter, and you can't control the backlight. The x250 is the best since there is no wifi whitelist, unofficial screens are fine in linux, the trackpad is good by default, and the battery market is so good sometimes they give you 2 6 cells instead of one, whereas the x230 ones are now going for $80.

Re: Apple Silicon Macs can't boot from external drive if internal drive failed

#220

Post by whywhywhywhy »

liminalsunset wrote: post #26

General grumpiness about this particular design decision aside, it appears that since the T2 Macs, the main SSD was being used to store core system firmware. On T2 I think it's BridgeOS that sends the EFI image to the Intel side to boot it, and it does the firmware verification and loading. This setup has a benefit; namely, it is now impossible to brick the system with a bad BIOS/EFI flash, and you'll never need to u…

This seems absurd to me, yeah ok the SSD failing could be indicative of a bigger issue. But also now if any single component required to boot the machine fails then I also lose my data.

We've turned several potential failure points resulting in data loss into almost every component on the board failing resulting in data loss.

We all know how much they charge for a full board replacement though and why this change will reflect well in Tim Cook's charts.

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