Creating Bootable Clone from Apple Silicon Mac

[dnanian]

There's no need to change things to HFS+. I would erase the whole drive, from the hardware (top), and format as APFS from the get-go.

[greengrass]

FWIW I had no problem creating a bootable clone on an m3 iMac. I created an APFS volume on an external SSD, then did an erase and copy all files with SD. Upon completion, I booted to the volume, turned on FileVault, let it run for a while and then booted back to the internal drive.

[mschmitt]

Originally Posted by greengrass

FWIW I had no problem creating a bootable clone on an m3 iMac. I created an APFS volume on an external SSD, then did an erase and copy all files with SD. Upon completion, I booted to the volume, turned on FileVault, let it run for a while and then booted back to the internal drive.

I'm hitting two main issues right now:

• First time I tried it, it crashed on the restart, because asr didn't rebuild the dyld cache. We've seen this before.
• Now I can't even get that far. It won't let me complete the authorize users/set owner process.

When you did it, did you try to restart by selecting in the System Settings? Or did you just reboot and hold the power button to choose a different drive?

Did it ask you to authorize a user and select an owner?

[greengrass]

Originally Posted by mschmitt

I'm hitting two main issues right now:

• First time I tried it, it crashed on the restart, because asr didn't rebuild the dyld cache. We've seen this before.
• Now I can't even get that far. It won't let me complete the authorize users/set owner process.

When you did it, did you try to restart by selecting in the System Settings? Or did you just reboot and hold the power button to choose a different drive?

Did it ask you to authorize a user and select an owner?

I did the reboot by holding the power button while choosing to restart. I don't remember it asking to authorize a user. There is only one user on this machine.

[mschmitt]

Same authorize/owner loop as before.

I did this:

1. Erased entire drive (i.e. reparitiioned), as APFS "Untilted"
2. Renamed to Backup T7
3. SuperDuper! erase-then-copy from internal booted SSD (Ventura 13.6.2)
4. System Settings > General > Startup Disk
5. Select Backup T7
6. TouchID to unlock system settings
7. "Startup Disk needs to authenticate to continue" - entered password
8. Restart...
9. Are you sure? Restart
10. "This volume does not have any authorized users for this computer". Authorize users...
11. Authorize my main account, entered password
12. Authorize emergency account, entered password
13. Continue
14. "Please enter the password for the user <me>" - entered
15. "Select an owner" - selected me on the boot drive, Authorize
16. "Please enter the password for the user <me>" - entered
17. "This volume does not have any authorized users for this computer".
18. repeats steps 10 - 16 forever

[dnanian]

Maybe your users on the internal drive are bad? You may want to consider reinstalling the OS to the internal (pretty basic and non-destructive) from Recovery.

[mschmitt]

I got past the authorize/owner loop. I did two things differently:

• Restarted the computer after the clone, before trying to set the Startup disk
• Waited longer before trying to set the Startup disk

I think the first time I tried this (which didn't get the authentication loop), I started the clone before going to bed. But the more recent attempts, I did the clone and immediately tried to start from it. I noticed that when I did that, Spotlight was still furiously indexing the volume; perhaps that interfered.

This time it didn't ask me to set an owner, only to authorize a user account.

The restart crashed (dyld cache), so I used macOS Recovery to reinstall Ventura on the backup drive. And it worked! It booted from the backup SSD (Ventura 13.6.2, same as on internal drive), and I could start FileVault encryption -- when I got that far once before with the HD backup, FileVault gave an error.

This does make me wonder: if the authentication/owners loop was due to either needing to reboot or wait for Spotlight, what would have happened when I did the SuperDuper! Smart Update on top of the clean macOS install, if I had rebooted and waited? Same error or something else?

Anyway, next milestone will be if it survives a Smart Update. I'd think it will.

[dnanian]

I can't see how Spotlight could interfere with this. Quite strange.