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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

#221

Post by thefz »

donkeyd wrote: post #193
azalemeth wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. One of my graduate students experienced this, the hard way: writing up his thesis, his mum plugged in "the wrong USB C" charger. I don't know exactly what happened, but the board was utterly fried. The problem with the soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's al…

> soldered-to-the-motherboard, everything-utterly-encrypted approach is that it's almost impossible to do data recovery Well, that's kind of the point. > You just have to be damn sure that you back it up correctly. Exactly. And that's as easy as plugging in an external hard drive occasionally, or storing critical files in the cloud.

> or storing critical files in the cloud. No. I refuse to let my vacation photos, hard drive images or hell, even my wallpaper collection to leave my house. No. I refuse. My data is my data.

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

#222

Post by GhettoComputers »

amatecha wrote: post #212
GhettoComputers wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That looks very nice, before you had to flash the bios yourself, I never heard of it. I just got lazy and never flashed the bios, I'll set time to use this. Makes the battery replacement much less painful, thank you!

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

#223

Post by GhettoComputers »

amatecha wrote: post #218
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?

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

Wonder what the benefit of battery packs are? Why not just have 18650s directly insert into the laptop?

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

#224

Post by amatecha »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #219
amatecha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah yeah, luckily the X230T I will mostly only use plugged in. I do agree, the energy efficiency (and battery cost) is one criticism of mine. That said, I'm not too worried about WLAN allowlist since I can supposedly remove that with 1vyrain (same with battery allowlist), if I even cared about it. Same with displays, the TN in the X230 is pretty sub-par but totally fine for me. Yeah, for now stuff is pretty easily available here, but I wonder how long that will last. Lots of people selling these machines for parts, so I can totally hoard some extra stuff if I want to... haha

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

#225

Post by phkahler »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #137
phkahler wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It also wouldn't win you any significant increase unusable lifespan, because when your drive starts retiring large numbers of blocks, all of your blocks are on the verge of failure. That's not true. Blocks degrade when written to. Most files are written once and read many times.

You're forgetting that SSDs use virtual addressing so writes are distributed relatively equally over the whole drive. Even data that is written once and never changed logically will probably move around on the SSD due to garbage collection. The virtualization algorithms are kept relatively secret, but I assume good SSDs will move full unchanged blocks around occasionally to distribute write load more equally on the p…

>> I assume good SSDs will move full unchanged blocks around occasionally to distribute write load more equally on the physical blocks.

I hadn't considered that. Make sense. Better to move never-changing data to blocks that are still good but not worn out so those available writes can be utilized.

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

#226

Post by dukeofdoom »

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…

The software fails before the hardware with apple products in my experience. I have an ipod touch 16GB from 2013, that I still use to play music, and itunes still supports it. But I can't browse the internet on it.

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

#227

Post by slownews45 »

kuschku wrote: post #209
slownews45 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We keep on hearing about folks needing to swap out disks out that are broken who ALSO don't have apple care AND are out of warranty? I mean, how many people is this vs the millions / billions of idevices out there? Apple simplifies / integrates like crazy - that is a focus for them. No separate bios flash - my guess is others start copying them personally. Because apple products hold value so well, I just sell me 2 y…

And the people buying your used devices have no apple care and are out of warranty, so they’ll complain if they can’t repair it. Apple devices will stop holding value so well the less repairable they get, which in turn will also increase your costs.

The "unrepairable" apple devices have far FAR higher resale value and lifetimes than most the Huawei / OPPO / etc used phones out there.

This is really the proof point.

This is a combination of apples total system engineering and software update story. You don't need applecare to get updtes on an iphone.

For example, looking at recently sold items on Ebay - Iphone 5S 32GB is going for $100. That's an 8 year old phone.

Take your 8 year old HTC - nothing close to that.

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

#228

Post by amatecha »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #222
amatecha wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

That looks very nice, before you had to flash the bios yourself, I never heard of it. I just got lazy and never flashed the bios, I'll set time to use this. Makes the battery replacement much less painful, thank you!

No problem! Yeah it looks a bit scary to me so I'll only try it if I can really dedicate some time and focus on it, and only if I really want to install the mod. I think this same mod is needed if you want to use X220 keyboard on the X230.

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

#229

Post by kube-system »

userbinator wrote: post #205
djrogers wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...and that's the second problem they created.

Disaster recovery is not a backup, nor should it supersede physical security in importance. Time Machine solves all of these problems.

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

#230

Post by gnicholas »

I bought an iMac in 2008. When it started getting slow, I bought an external SSD and booted over FireWire 800. It gave my machine many more years of life, and in fact it still works just fine! It's not my daily driver, but I'm glad that I can boot it from an external drive.

Too bad my next Mac won't be so flexible!

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