A supposedly bootable drive not showing on opening screen

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I have a new Fantom brand drive that shows as bootable in the Preferences screen (see attached screen shot) and is recognied as bootable by Carbon Copy Cloner. But when I start my iMac while holding down the Option key and get a choice of drives to boot from, the Fantom drive is not there. Unfortunately I cannot take a screen shot tof that. What does show is McintoshHD, OWC#2 and something called Recovery-10.13.1. I am running 10.13.4.

Does anyone know what is happening and whether I can actually get the Fantom drive to act a s a bootable drive?

Thanks.

Screen Shot 2018-05-10 at 5.28.26 PM.png
 
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What is the format/partition type of the FantomHD?
 
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It is Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and GUID.
 
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SSD drives, under macOS High Sierra (10.13), need to be formatted as APFS.
 
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Which is done automatically as part of the install process.

Try selecting the Fantom in System Preferences by clicking on it once, and hit the restart button and see what happens.
 
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Hi Mark, for clarification purposes, can you look at the formatting and partition of the external SSD (Fantom), and post a screen grab displaying the info?
 

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SSD drives, under macOS High Sierra (10.13), need to be formatted as APFS.

Not entirely true. Only internal SSD drives that have had macOS High Sierra installed will be formatted as APFS. That does not apply to external SSDs. And we really do not know if the Fantom is a SSD or a HHD?

It appears from your screen shot that the Fantom HD is showing up as a boot selection. Did you click the small lock, enter your admin password and then select the drive to boot from?
 
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Not entirely true. Only internal SSD drives that have had macOS High Sierra installed will be formatted as APFS.


Thanks for this, I was just about to question the earlier statements.

And ditto on the rest of your suggestion which I think is also what harry was suggesting.


PS: Doesn't High Sierra even bother to highlight the selected boot drive with a highlight color like the good old Apple GUI days???
Sure doesn't look like it in the OP's screen shot above. :|




- Patrick
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Not entirely true. Only internal SSD drives that have had macOS High Sierra installed will be formatted as APFS. That does not apply to external SSDs. And we really do not know if the Fantom is a SSD or a HHD?
I was under the impression, that any SSD, to be used as a macOS High Sierra startup drive, was to be formatted as APFS. Granted, we don't know the Fantom is an SSD, I missed that.

It appears from your screen shot that the Fantom HD is showing up as a boot selection. Did you click the small lock, enter your admin password and then select the drive to boot from?
The issue, is at startup, when holding option, the Fantom drive does not appear as a bootable option.
 
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The issue, is at startup, when holding option, the Fantom drive does not appear as a bootable option.


Some Macs don't need or want any key held down when the Startup Drive has been selected in the System Prefs Startup Drive pref pane.




- Patrick
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Hi,

First, the Fantom drive is not an SSD drive, but a regular drive. Harry, I'm concerned that if I choose the Fantom as the startup in Preferences and there is an issue I won't be able to boot at all. On the road now, but will look at the other thread this afternoon. Thanks to all.

Mark
 

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Hi,

Harry, I'm concerned that if I choose the Fantom as the startup in Preferences and there is an issue I won't be able to boot at all.
Mark
Slydude answers in the best possible impersonation of Harry:
I don't think this will be an issue. If the Phantom drive doesn't boot your Mac should simply revert to booting from the internal drive. If that doesn't happen you should be able to boot from the recovery partition and reset the startup preference pane to boot from the internal drive.
 
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I don't think this will be an issue.


+1. I'd agree.




- Patrick
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Someone had asked for a screen shot of the Disk Utility partition screen. I'd be glad to but although the screen says that i am allowed to post attachment, the attachment area at the bottom of the screen . Do not know why.

Also, I'll take a look at the other thread as suggested.

Finally, I'm about to follow Harry's suggestion to change Preferences to make the Fantom the startup disk. I'll let you know how that goes.
 
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Ok, I was able to startup from the Fantom Drive after changing Preferences. But when I then did another restart holding down the Option key, the Fantom drive was not among the startup drives shown. So it seems that in order to use the Fantom as a startup I have to make it the permanent startup, which I do not want to do. But I still have to read that other thread.

Thanks again to all.
 
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ignore this post
 
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So it seems that in order to use the Fantom as a startup I have to make it the permanent startup, which I do not want to do.


It's only the permanent startup drive until you change it again after it boots, so it's not very permanent really.

Some Mac models just work that way and that may be the only method they understand.




- Patrick
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Right. But my aim was to use the Fantom as the Carbon Copy Cloner backup drive that I could boot from if the internal drive failed. And I can't do that if the Fantom does not show up as a boot drive choice on startup.
 

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I'm coming to this late, but have followed the posts from the beginning.

Clearly, I may be misunderstanding the setup; but my understanding is that the Fantom drive is a spinning platter drive and is intended as a Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) backup drive.

So what's on it just now? If, as shown in post #1, it is simply a copy of OS X 10.13.4, then it can't be bootable. For Fantom to be bootable, it must have bootable software on it - like a Bootable OS X Installer for 10.13.4 or a CCC backup.

Mark said:
my aim was to use the Fantom as the Carbon Copy Cloner backup drive

Well, as I see it, you would have to clone the Mac's IHD using CCC to make Fantom bootable.

Or create a 10.13.4 bootable installer drive on Fantom.

Please feel free to tell me I've got this all wrong. My feelings don't matter - we want to help Mark.

Ian
 

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