How to Start Your M2 Chip Mac from An External Hard Drive?

Instead of utilizing a start-up disk, you could find that you occasionally need to boot your M2 chip Mac from an external drive or boot volume rather than a start-up disk. There is great significance in being able to boot from an external disk.

You may need to perform some problem troubleshooting, perform partitioning, repair the drive, apply updates, format the entire disk, and install OS X, among other things. When you boot up your Mac using an external boot volume, each one of these tasks is carried out flawlessly.

Hold down the correct key combination while the Mac is starting up to allow the computer to boot from a bootable external hard drive. The precise key combinations that can be utilized differ marginally from one Mac model to another for a few reasons.

Additionally, you are unable to boot your computer from just any external hard drive. For the external hard drive to be bootable, it must have correct partitioning and an installation of the appropriate version of the Mac operating system (OS). The external drive must be connected to PowerPC-based Macs through FireWire to boot from an external hard drive, but Intel-based Macs can boot from either FireWire or USB connections.

How to Start M2 Mac from An External Hard Drive?

Here, in this post, you will find a comprehensive and easy-to-follow guide that will walk you through each step of starting a M2 chip Mac from an external hard drive. So, let's take a look.

Follow the steps below:

#1 Create a bootable clone backup for M2 chip Mac

First of all, just create a bootable clone backup for your M2 chip Mac. The quickest way to create a bootable clone of your M2 Mac to an external hard drive is to use disk cloning application.

Donemax Disk Clone for Mac is a powerful, safe and easy-to-use disk cloning application which supports to create bootable clone backup for Mac.

Follow the steps below to create bootable clone backup for M2 Mac:

Step 1. Connect the external hard drive to your M2 Mac. Then open Donemax Disk Clone for Mac, choose disk cloning mode - OS Clone. It will securely clone M2 Mac's startup disk to the external hard drive and make it be bootable.

Step 2. Select the external hard drive as the destination drive. Click on Clone Now button to securely clone all data including macOS, apps, settings, documents to the external hard drive.

Once the process gets finished, you can use the external hard drive as the bootable disk.

#2 Set the external hard drive as the startup disk for your Mac

Follow the steps below to use the bootable clone as the startup disk on your M2 Mac (boot from the external hard drive once):

Step 1. Turn off your Mac.

Step 2. Press and hold the Power button.

Step 3. Keep holding until you see Loading startup options.

Step 4. Wait for the Startup Options screen to appear.

Use the Left and Right arrow keys (or the trackpad or mouse if you can move the cursor around) to select the external hard drive. Then, press Enter or select Continue to boot from it.

Follow the steps below to set the external hard drive as the default startup disk for your M2 Mac (boot from external hard drive every time):

Step 1. Open the Apple menu and select System Preferences.

Step 2. Select Startup Disk.

Step 3. Click the Lock icon and enter your Mac's account password to unlock changes.

Step 4. Select your startup disk.

Step 5. Click Restart to make the changes.

Follow this guide you can easily create a bootable clone for your M2 chip Mac and use the bootable clone as the startup disk. Donemax Disk Clone for Mac also can help you clone SSD or HDD on M2 Mac or make a dmg disk image for M2 Mac.