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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

#381

Post by ngcc_hk »

azalemeth wrote: post #182
wtallis wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice, exhausting NAND write endurance is usually not what causes SSDs to fail in the field. It is especially unlikely to be the underlying cause of unexpected and seemingly premature catastrophic SSD failure. Also, it is not possible for an SSD to decrease your usable storage space over time. That would break any partition table format or filesystem that expects an ordinary block device. It also wouldn't win y…

> 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…

You always do backup (another hard drive), GitHub (these days free private repro), Dropbox, iCloud, … etc. Totslly rely upon a hard disk … a big lesson to learn.

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

#382

Post by ngcc_hk »

mikewarot wrote: post #372
CelestialTeapot wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. Not that I don't appreciate a security-minded platform, it just seems overkill for 99% of the people who'll purchase them, and do nothing but cause heartache when the internal SSD fails. And fail they do. it's rare, but I've had several SSDs (Toshiba and Crucial, if…

I recently learned that my hard drive was encrypted with Bitlocker, had I not been attempting to get Genode running off a USB stick, I might have gone on for a year or to in blissful ignorance of how remarkable insecure my stuff was as a result of this. It took about 12 hours to decrypt it, and restore sanity. Availability is part of security, if it's encrypted, and you don't (or can't) boot just the way Microsoft wa…

If it is so, your data will go. Backup backup backup. Otherwise unencrypted data cannot save you.

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

#383

Post by grishka »

sroussey wrote: post #377
grishka wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not a joke. If the password is sufficiently complex, it can't be brute forced in a reasonable amount of time. But it's still a way for you to get your data back having only the SSD on which it is stored. Or, well, fine, let there be an active element. But let me export the master key then. It's my device, I have root access to it, I should be allowed to do that. And, yes, do still put the SSD into a slot. > I…

I mean, just turn off encryption if that’s what you want. I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored. And I doubt you are using a password the length of the key. Well, maybe you create a USB human interface device that fits on your keyring to type it for you. I do have something like that for one time codes, but if that is your sophistication level, then we wouldn’t have this d…

There are key-derivation functions like PBKDF2 that are computationally expensive enough that it would make brute-forcing infeasible at best and impossible at worst. Perhaps only if your password is 1234 or qwerty, but even then it would take literal years.

> I don’t think you grasp how the encryption keys are generated, derived, and stored.

And you're wrong.

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

#384

Post by quitit »

kennywinker wrote: post #302
quitit wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landfill and the environment are legitimate concerns.. i’m just gonna quote the website > The new MacBook Pro has been carefully designed with the environment in mind. The enclosure is now made with 100% recycled aluminum. And we use recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets in the product. MacBook Pro is free of numerous harmful substances and all the virgin wood fiber in our packaging comes from responsibly-m…

That's all fine and good, but once any single component of that block of embodied carbon fails the whole thing is now e-waste. Which means I guess apple is buying up carbon offsets in order to recycle that e-waste back into a new M2 or M3 mac? How much faith do you have in carbon offsets? The aluminum and rare earth elements are recycled - what about the rest of it? A modular design means a failed SSD only sends the…

they release a document which outlines exactly what they do: https://www.apple.com/environment/

But just something else to keep in mind: at mass production scales certain choices that may seem less useful for repair, often greatly enhance reliability. eg soldered on componentry - such things don’t present an issue to the official refurbishment programme however they present a challenge to the incredibly small % of people who want to open their laptop for amateur repair.

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

#385

Post by tpetry »

floatboth wrote: post #344
wtallis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For laptops, soldered vs socketed DRAM is mostly about power, not performance. But it is true that soldering DRAM makes it possible to reach higher bus speeds than are practical to achieve through a DIMM slot; this is why GPUs don't have upgradable RAM.

Laptops that have soldered RAM (including Apple) do not come with overclocked RAM though. I don't even know of any system with soldered RAM that would let you try pushing the speeds in practice, so this advantage is never leveraged. But we do know how far DIMMs can go. Mainboard memory trace layouts have gotten ridiculously optimized. DDR4-5200 is a totally "normal" XMP spec now, there are even 5400 kits out there I…

Who is saying the soldered ram is never overclocked? You cant overclock changeable ram by default because you don‘t know what the customer will use. But by soldering the ram you know you will use very specific parts, so you could (maybe they do?) tune the settings because it does not have to work with thousands of combinations.

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

#386

Post by Aastaruth »

Mac users took the Mac's "External Boot" feature for granted for years now. Now new Apple Software Restore isn't suitable I must say for the new Apple Silicon Mac storage and it is causing lots of issues for Apple Mac users. The article is helpful in many ways. I will surely give a try to CCC 5.1.27 and CCC 6 to make bootable backups on Apple Silicon Macs.

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

#387

Post by mikewarot »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #382
mikewarot wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently learned that my hard drive was encrypted with Bitlocker, had I not been attempting to get Genode running off a USB stick, I might have gone on for a year or to in blissful ignorance of how remarkable insecure my stuff was as a result of this. It took about 12 hours to decrypt it, and restore sanity. Availability is part of security, if it's encrypted, and you don't (or can't) boot just the way Microsoft wa…

If it is so, your data will go. Backup backup backup. Otherwise unencrypted data cannot save you.

Well, the main reason I was upset is that if I dual boot something else, even if it supports NTFS, my data is unavailable to it.

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

#388

Post by Remiluke »

It was so easy before for Mac users to drag and drop data and use it for external boot. Then Apple Mac OS X made it more complicated. And now the new Apple Silicon Macs have made it too hard for the user to recover from hardware failure. Through this article, I have got my concerns addressed and now the solution is here. Thumbs up for the info.

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

#389

Post by Isaackane »

Remiluke wrote: post #388

It was so easy before for Mac users to drag and drop data and use it for external boot. Then Apple Mac OS X made it more complicated. And now the new Apple Silicon Macs have made it too hard for the user to recover from hardware failure. Through this article, I have got my concerns addressed and now the solution is here. Thumbs up for the info.

Yeah the Big Sur has brought a big change by introducing some significant new changes by residing its OS on a cryptographically sealed "Signed System Volume”. Only an Apple-proprietary utility, "Apple Software Restore" (ASR) can copy it and that’s incredible though.

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

#390

Post by webmobdev »

bitwize wrote: post #199
webmobdev wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's just reads like BS. Because it partly is. It's just a lame defence / justification of soldering SSD, RAM and other parts, the major advantage of which is to make modern electronics more complex, hard to repair and prevent upgrades (i.e. "planned obsolescence"). If SSDs were reliable beyond 5+ years, manufacturers would be highlighting that and even offering guarantees for such a period. (Hell, most RAM today…

Except soldering everything on can give you HUGE performance boosts. Like, laptops come with soldered-on RAM that you can't get in a DIMM configuration because the soldered on stuff is so fast it needs a fast path to the CPU, which DIMM slots can't provide. And now with Apple building all system RAM directly into the chip die, it's just a whole new ballgame. So you can either go modular and have a slow PC, or you can…

I have seen many comments parroting this line but none of you provide a source to back this assertion. Your claim that modular PC's RAM is slower is quite ignorant 'cos the bandwidth for the RAM bus has been consistently increasingly (currently DDR5) and remain the same whether it is soldered or modular.
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