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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

#31

Post by GhettoComputers »

fartcannon wrote: post #20
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Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever.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…

Thinkpads are owned by Lenovo, a known bad actor who installed, for example, rootkits on their own hardware.

Never the thinkpad.

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

#32

Post by VortexDream »

keymone wrote: post #16

i get that their business is at risk, but i've literally never had a macbook disk fail on me in 12 years of dealing with half a dozen laptops (oldest one still in use today). this will get way more attention than it deserves.

Not sure how this is relevant in any way. I've seen dozens of MacBooks where the hard drive had failed. Not to say that they fail any more than other laptops, but unless Apple has come up with some magical technology that makes their hard drives never fail, this is a terrible, terrible change. Water is wet, the moon circles the earth and hard drives fail (eventually, some sooner than others).

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

#33

Post by GhettoComputers »

aaomidi wrote: post #21
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Silly idea in tech, the hardware will be long outdated before someone look for parts which are going to be overpriced, and the company might be gone forever.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…

It also means that you can keep the same shell while changing other components to upgrade it, yknow, like desktops.

I have the same shell/case.

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #6
NKosmatos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again Apple is showing how to do things stupidly. They won't allow you to boot from an external HDD/SSD if the internal one fails. On top of that they make it extremely difficult to replace the internal disk on your own. Carbon Copy Cloner has been my number one program all these years, but I think that Apple is pushing us loyal and technical competent people away. They just want "simple" users.

They want you to take the device to the dealership.

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by rootusrootus »

rvz wrote: post #18

Unsurprising. Given the countless times I have warned about the risks of going 'all in' on an Apple Silicon Mac and now they realise. Good luck with your files if the internal hard drive is dead. Consider creating regular backups otherwise your can say goodbye to your files. No thanks and absolutely no deal to that.

Surely everyone on HN does regular backups of some kind? Most of us probably have two or three different kinds of backups, if I'm to believe what I read here (e.g. I have everything I care about on cloud storage, also backed up by Time Machine, and backed up by Backblaze).

If my MBP fails, I'll walk into the Apple Store and swap for a new one, hook up my TM backup and be back working in an hour or so.

I've always, always assumed that the internal drive can fail at any moment and take every last byte of data with it.

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

#37

Post by RKearney »

gameswithgo wrote: post #7

Consider options like Framework laptops that let you actually own your hardware, and repair it.

Looks like all their laptops use Intel processors? Do they let you control and disable Intel's management engine on that CPU? If not then I don't see how one really "owns" the hardware.

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

#38

Post by unethical_ban »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #17
gameswithgo wrote: post #7

Consider options like Framework laptops that let you actually own your hardware, and repair it.

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…

"It's a silly idea in tech, my computer does the same thing".

Framework may not be for the purpose of upgrading a laptop incrementally for ten years, but it has the core competency of intending to let you repair every component of your laptop as needed, while having the profile of a slim but powerful machine. They are the anti-apple from that perspective.

Your $200 laptop is not as good as the Framework laptop. You either bought a Chromebook, or you bought used meaning someone else ate depreciation, or you're comparing apples to oranges.

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

#39

Post by asdff »

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 like a failure on a part of M1 systems rather than the T2 chip. I have an intel Macbook Air with the T2 chip for touchid, and I have a bootcamp partition that I boot off of via an external ssd over usb3 no problem.

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

#40

Post by GhettoComputers »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #22
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…

And the used 2011 i3, that wouldn't become garbage if it were repairable would get sold to someone less performance / price consciousness? Now it gets trashed.

Nope, nobody wants it. You can try to sell it though. People don’t want even a free processor that needs an expensive mobo they’ll need to buy our own when they can get a much better ryzen board and a cheap processor that will trounce it. Nobody wants these old processors, many are so useless they’re being drilled for keychains.
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