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<blockquote data-quote="Lifeisabeach" data-source="post: 1882566" data-attributes="member: 38864">I did a little digging after it occurred to me that the M1 Macs may require a Thunderbolt drive to boot from externally. My backup drive has a USB-C port and is USB 3.1 compliant. Macworld has confirmed that a &quot;native&quot; Thunderbolt drive is required, but also says it has to be a &quot;native&quot; 3.1 USB drive. I'm a little confused since USB 3.1 isn't Thunderbolt also, but I know that a Thunderbolt cable is required to use Target Disk Mode. A USB-C cable won't work, even though the connector is the same. The article also mentions that the drive must be completely wiped in advance, and since mine has multiple partitions and I only erased the Backup partition, maybe that was the problem. But it could be a combination of that and not being a Thunderbolt drive. I'll try to experiment a bit sometime.Now, this does raise a question. These systems aren't supposed to be bootable at all if the internal SSD fails as per the articles MacInWin shared, due to the presence of a cryptographically signed system volume. But if macOS is &quot;properly&quot; installed to an external Thunderbolt SSD, does that signed volume get created there also? If so, and being connected by Thunderbolt, it's as good as an internal drive as far as the connection goes, so maybe it would be bootable still in the event of a catastrophic failure of the internal SSD? Just spitballing, and maybe these questions have already been answered somewhere.[URL unfurl=&quot;true&quot;]https://www.macworld.com/article/331916/how-to-start-up-your-m1-mac-from-an-external-drive.html[/URL]</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lifeisabeach, post: 1882566, member: 38864"] I did a little digging after it occurred to me that the M1 Macs may require a Thunderbolt drive to boot from externally. My backup drive has a USB-C port and is USB 3.1 compliant. Macworld has confirmed that a "native" Thunderbolt drive is required, but also says it has to be a "native" 3.1 USB drive. I'm a little confused since USB 3.1 isn't Thunderbolt also, but I know that a Thunderbolt cable is required to use Target Disk Mode. A USB-C cable won't work, even though the connector is the same. The article also mentions that the drive must be completely wiped in advance, and since mine has multiple partitions and I only erased the Backup partition, maybe that was the problem. But it could be a combination of that and not being a Thunderbolt drive. I'll try to experiment a bit sometime. Now, this does raise a question. These systems aren't supposed to be bootable at all if the internal SSD fails as per the articles MacInWin shared, due to the presence of a cryptographically signed system volume. But if macOS is "properly" installed to an external Thunderbolt SSD, does that signed volume get created there also? If so, and being connected by Thunderbolt, it's as good as an internal drive as far as the connection goes, so maybe it would be bootable still in the event of a catastrophic failure of the internal SSD? Just spitballing, and maybe these questions have already been answered somewhere. [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.macworld.com/article/331916/how-to-start-up-your-m1-mac-from-an-external-drive.html[/URL] [/QUOTE]

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