05-02-2025, 11:35 AM
Black,
Might be worth nuking and paving the internal once you've confirmed the machines is working perfectly with the external as its boot drive. Give it a serious workout. After that, you can nuke the internal and clone the external to it as a backup. Or, just ignore it entirely. I wouldn't do anything with the internal that until you know the machine is working perfectly, though.
Much in the same way that when my office's 2019 iMac crapped out, I immediately replaced it with a Late 2018 Mini. The mini came with a newer OS on its internal. As a part of the swap process, I booted off the Mini's internal SSD and created an account on it. This allowed me to test the machine to make sure all was working perfectly.
Once that was done, I booted into recovery mode, adjusted the boot settings to allow the machine to boot off an external drive. Connected a current clone backup of the iMac's Mojave drive to the machine, rebooted and gave it a workout. Once all was well, I adjusted the startup disk setting to default to the external drive. Done.
Now, each time I reboot off the external, I get the error message that the internal drive is incompatible. No surprise since the Mini's internal drive was configured with a newer OS than the one on the external. I just close the notification ignore the internal drive and go about my business.
Robert
Might be worth nuking and paving the internal once you've confirmed the machines is working perfectly with the external as its boot drive. Give it a serious workout. After that, you can nuke the internal and clone the external to it as a backup. Or, just ignore it entirely. I wouldn't do anything with the internal that until you know the machine is working perfectly, though.
Much in the same way that when my office's 2019 iMac crapped out, I immediately replaced it with a Late 2018 Mini. The mini came with a newer OS on its internal. As a part of the swap process, I booted off the Mini's internal SSD and created an account on it. This allowed me to test the machine to make sure all was working perfectly.
Once that was done, I booted into recovery mode, adjusted the boot settings to allow the machine to boot off an external drive. Connected a current clone backup of the iMac's Mojave drive to the machine, rebooted and gave it a workout. Once all was well, I adjusted the startup disk setting to default to the external drive. Done.
Now, each time I reboot off the external, I get the error message that the internal drive is incompatible. No surprise since the Mini's internal drive was configured with a newer OS than the one on the external. I just close the notification ignore the internal drive and go about my business.
Robert