Tell me about startup manager
I thought about installing Catalina in an external disk partition (which is known to work), and then SuperDupe it to the internal hard drive. This is why I need the Startup Manager to work at boot time. So then I'm stuck with a bootable Catalina on the internal disk, and no way to tell El Cap to use that as the Startup disk.
If I change the Startup disk to be my El Capitan partition on the external drive, that will work, but then there's no way to revert, because El Capitan won't recognize the internal hard disk as a bootable disk, so I won't be able to choose it. Now: if I succeed in installing Catalina on my internal hard disk, and boot from it, all is well. But, when I reboot back into El Cap from the internal hard disk, then it doesn't recognize the new install, doesn't mount the partition, can't select it as a Startup disk, and Disk Utility doesn't even show it as a formatted partition - simply refers to it as "Untitled".
#TELL ME ABOUT STARTUP MANAGER INSTALL#
So, if for example, I'm running El Cap on my internal HD, and I install Catalina on an external disk partition, it will work, and reboot and run off the external partition. That means that if I install Catalina on an external drive partition, El Cap won't see it because it doesn't recognize the partition FS. The thing is, Catalina uses APFS, whereas El Cap is still using HFS+. The install attempt failed when the system attempted to reboot for the first time (it hung), and so, when I manually rebooted, the system came back up on the El Cap system running from the external drive. I booted up my El Cap system on my external hard disk, erased the internal hard disk using Disk Utility, and ran the Catalina install app from the Ep Cap system, telling it to install to "Macintosh HD". I'm in a situation where I'm trying to install Catalina on my Mini's internal drive, which is currently running El Capitan 10.11.6.
#TELL ME ABOUT STARTUP MANAGER MAC#
My configuration is Mac Mini, late 2014, 8G memory, 1TB internal HD, external G-Tech drive connected via USB2, wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse. This does NOT work the system boots from the last startup disk that was set regardless of my holding the Alt key down immediately upon power-up. I have a couple of bootable images on an external G-Tech drive connected via USB2, and if I want to boot from one of them, I go into Settings and change the startup disk, reboot, and all is well.īut: I SHOULD be able to press the Option (Alt on a Windows KB) key after manually rebooting so I can choose the startup disk then.