The installation follows two phases, as usual. If you’ve been keeping this simple, that’s the primary admin user who will have an account on the external system, and the current user – you.

You’ll then be asked to enter the owner’s password for the installation to continue. If you really don’t want to do that, then life can get more complicated, and I’ve ended up with two different user accounts as a result.

The straightforward option here is to tick that box, which eventually will create the account as the primary admin user with the same settings. The installer then offers to copy the account settings for that user (as the owner of the external volume). This user doesn’t need to be an admin user as such, but they should already have access to the encrypted Data volume on the internal storage so they can be recognised as an owner. As I work from the primary admin account and there are no other users, the choice isn’t difficult. When invited to choose the disk on which to install macOS, I selected the APFS volume in the correct container of my external disk.īefore the installation process can start, the bootable volume needs an owner. If you really want, you can do this all in Recovery instead. I then ran the standard macOS 12.0.1 Installer app downloaded from the App Store, from the main Applications folder. The latter relate to the recognition of that bootable volume, and confirm that it has thoroughly ceased to exist. This gives a detailed commentary, which now makes clear that any Preboot and Recovery volumes are also deleted, and that references to xART sessions are also removed. I erased the Volume Group in that container using Disk Utility. One important point here is don’t attempt to do any of this with 12.0, as it could well fail miserably. One happened to be Monterey 12.0, which I was only too happy to sacrifice for this purpose. My starting point wasn’t a freshly formatted disk, but a SATA/USB-C SSD which has already been divided up into multiple containers (partitions) containing bootable versions of macOS. Total time taken should be a few minutes, plus the time required to install macOS on the external disk. As a sequel to my article about the basic principles of using an M1 Mac, this explains how to set up a bootable external disk in Monterey on an M1 Pro. I’m therefore surprised that users still contact me claiming that they’ve had problems with more recent versions of macOS, including Monterey, and with the new M1 Pro and Max models. In the early days of the original M1 Macs and versions of Big Sur prior to 11.4, installing and setting up a bootable copy of macOS on an external disk was unreliable and often failed.

Add second hard drive to imac pro 2018