Don’t worry about that. It’s just informing you that Apple wants to phase out the bash shell that was the default in previous macOS releases. The command you typed switches your account’s shell to zsh, which is very similar, but has a different set of license terms that are more compatible with Apple’s product. Nothing you need to worry about.
This is also not surprising, given what you cite below. Monterey is using APFS features that were (I think ) introduced in Catalina or Big Sur. Since it doesn’t know what those features are, it’s warning you about them. I assume this is the use of volume groups and firmlinks, which are used within a container to associate the various volumes (especially System and Data) with each other so they will mount together and appear as one in the way they are supposed to appear.
Looking at your diskutil list output from Monterey, it looks much more like what I was expecting to see (and what I see on my Big Sur system). In particular, /dev/disk5 (your Monterey APFS container) now shows:
Monterey - Data. Your data volume, as you’ve already seen
Preboot, Recovery and VM - again, as expected
Monterey. Note that is is no longer a blank name or an error. This is the Monterey System volume
com.apple.os.update-.... This is the Monterey sealed snapshot volume that it boots from. Note that the type is APFS Snapshot, not APFS Volume and it’s name (disk5s4s1) indicates that it is a snapshot of disk5s4 (your Monterey System volume)
We see the same thing with more details under diskutil apfs list:
disk5s1 (Monterey - Data) now shows the correct role (Data)
Preboot, Recovery and VM are as expected
disk5s4 (Monterey) shows its name and has a role of System. It contains a sealed snapshot, disk5s4s1, which is what Monterey is booting from
Your screen shot from Monterey’s Disk Utility also shows this. You’ve got a Monterey volume group (which you’re showing) that contains two volumes - Monterey (the System volume) and Monterey - Data (the Data volume), and Monterey has a snapshot. Note also that the System volume is not mounted, but its snapshot is. This is what you should expect to see on any system running Big Sur or later.
In short, I no longer think you’re actually seeing anything wrong. What you were observing is a result of the fact that Apple added new features to APFS over the years. Monterey is using (and relying on) some of them (volume groups, signed system volumes, and probably some other features), but Mojave has no clue what they are, so it present what it thinks it can figure out and warns you about this situation.
I don’t think that “Update” partition is real. I think it is Mojave trying desperately to make sense out of the signed system volume snapshot and failing to do so. Note that diskutil list shows that snapshot with a name of com.apple.os.update-...
And that volume doesn’t appear when Monterey is running.
I don’t think you’ll see it from Catalina either, because Catalina is also using separate System and Data volumes (and therefore volume groups and firmlinks), even though it doesn’t use a sealed system volume snapshot as the boot volume.
The “Update” volume referenced there appears (as far as I can tell) only on the internal storage device of an M1-based Mac, in a separate volume group from the one used to hold macOS itself.
I don’t think it’s the same thing @Jim_D is observing, but I could be wrong.
David -
Thank you for evaluating those new terminal lists for me. Sounds like I had a relatively successful install the second time. Because you had mentioned in a previous post that there was the possibility of an update (or installation) in progress that got interrupted, I deleted the Monterey installer and downloaded a fresh one - so possibly the issue was with that.
One other question: although I did not migrate my applications folder, when I was booted in Monterey, any of those apps that showed a question mark in the dock actually launched when I clicked on them - is that due to how containers work?
I have one Mac mini 2012 and one 2014. The 2012 has Catalina on the internal disk but I usually use Sierra on an SSD. The 2014 has Sierra on the internal disk (iTunes!) and I have SSDs with Monterey, Sierra, and Catalina. Which OS I use depends on what I want to do. (I can’t stand the new Podcast app! Probably designed by that form-before-function Ive.)
On the 2012 there is no problem with connecting one or more Samsung T5 and/or T7 SSDs. They show in Startup Disk and in the disk selection pane on restart with Alt-key. The restart works in both cases.
On the 2014 I used to be able to connect exactly 1 SSD and it showed up in Startup Disk and restarted. It did not work with more than one SSD connected at the same time, however. For some reason (perhaps a system update macOS 12 → 12.2?) the restart from Startup Disk does not work any more even though the SSD(s) show up in it. The restart is always from the internal disk. The restart-Alt only shows the internal disk the first time, but after another power cycle it shows all connected SSDs and restarts from the selected one. I have tried a large number of combinations of OSes and SSDs.
The end result seems to be that Samsung T5 and T7 SSDs work as expected on a Mac mini 2012, but requires tricks to work on an 2014. The 2012 USB only supplies 5V 1A but the T7s work even though they are specd at 1,5A.
I cannot, because of this, upgrade Monterey to 12.2.1 since the restart during install ends up on the internal disk. APFS on that disk is not an alternative since that filesystem does not go well on rotating media. And the 2012 mini stops at Catalina.
I hope there will be an new Mac mini with Apple Silicon this year!
I had the same experience/workaround with the 2014 mac mini. This is what fixed it:
Install a wired keyboard that works for NVRAM resets, not all work, press CMD-Option-P-R and keep pressed until you hear the 5th chime - you need to reset the NVRAM at least four times consecutively.
In a previous thread, I provided screen shots of my Toshiba SSD’s and a Samsung T7 which shows a power requirement of 896mA so I’m wondering where you get the 1.5 power number from:
Which iTunes are you using? Catalina can run older iTunes versions installed through Retroactive unless you’re using one older than what is listed there:
paalb -
I will try the NVRAM resets. Will they do something to prevent running older OSes? I have to research the NVRAM.
jk2gs -
“In a previous thread, I provided screen shots of my Toshiba SSD’s and a Samsung T7 which shows a power requirement of 896mA so I’m wondering where you get the 1.5 power number from:”
Somwhere in this thread it was suggested that the current from USB 2/3, 900mA max, would not be enough to boot a T7. I have seen the 896 mA too in my System Information, which is all it can get. Perhaps 896 mA is enough outside Korea :-). After all it does boot with some difficulties.
jk2gs -
“Which iTunes are you using?”
iTunes 12.8.2. It was the oldest I could easily find on my disks. Earlier versions worked even more intuitively. Every new release removed more useful features. I chose Sierra because it is HFS, small, and loads speedily from a rotating disk. I will check out Retroactive, sounds interesting.
I researched this very same issue a few weeks back and tried many suggestions from the list. The bottom line is that no matter what I do…the T7 will not boot a 2014 mini despite the T7 being fully bootable on both my M1 Pro MBP and 2019 Intel iMac and despite 2 or 3 complete nuke and pave reinstalls on the T7. Sys Prefs lets me choose it as a startup disk as does option-boot…but it just doesn’t boot that particular generation. I even verified that the power required in System Info for the T7 matches the power available on that model but no go.
The T7 works fine for what I got it for…which was a network drive share for my CCC derived TM-like solution since the actual TM to network drives doesn’t reliably work over time and fails for random reasons. I’ve got 2 laptops that used to try TM network to the mini and the 2019 iMac with identically setup shares and while they all worked as expected originally…after some indeterminate time period one or the other laptops would stop backing up to one of the destinations with a whole series of error messages. Most of the messages were useless like “backup failed to complete” or “the destination is not available” even though it was easily visible to and mountable.
My original intent in getting it to boot was to speed up performance when remoted in for whatever reason on the server…the spinning drive takes a long time to launch apps or list Finder folders and while the transfer speeds to the network shares are 15x or 20x as fast as the Samsung Backup+ spinning drive replaced by the T7 I figured that better macOS UI performance would be nice as well. I finally gave up after mucking about it for 3 weeks or so and decided it wasn’t worth worrying about any more since I probably remote in via Screens at most every month or so and probably less than that.
Have any of you looked at your firmware version? It would be interesting to see if firmware version is related to the amount of difficulty in getting the T7 or any other external systems to boot reliably, or at all.
Firmware is particularly troublesome when running new systems and old systems on the same hardware, because firmware isn’t tested at all for unsupported systems so new firmware can break things for the older system.
We have no choice about firmware updates, they get installed (in principle) when you install or update a system, and there’s no going back. They don’t always get installed when they should be, though they can sometimes be forced to install.
Howard Oakley has at least 30 pages of results for a search on firmware. A few of them worth checking out:
The NVRAM reset will not give you any problem. I have High Sierra on the internal disk and have had Mojave, Big Sur and Monterey on the Samsung. I use it at work for testing software for deployment to users. The users might be on different OS’es so I test on all supported by Apple. The NVRAM reset has been a troubleshooting tool since way back. After the NVRAM has been reset, you may want to go into System Preferences and restore any settings that have been reset (such as volume and display brightness levels).
Not at home …but I updated the T7 yesterday to 1.74 (I think but to whatever is current) with no effect on booting. Lock Rattler et. al. tell me the mini firmware is up to date which it should be since I installed Monterey on it.
APFS cannot be used to create a bootable installer, IIRC the createinstallmedia will reformat it as HFS+. But APFS can absolutely be used as disk format for a Monterey boot volume. In fact, it’s the default.
I have been reading this thread and I suspect some peculiarity with the old Mac mini.
I could not boot Catalina from a Filevault-encrypted external drive. Bombich reported it as a known issue.
I see you are not using Filevault on the external drive, but there could be some related issue that would never be apparent.
Of course you can…upgrading the mini’s spinning hard drive to Monterey converts it to APFS and it boots just fine. I dunno why the APFS formatted and verified bootable T7 Monterey installation won’t boot on 2014 mini hardware…but the fact that it’s APFS isn’t it.
I would highly recommend skipping Catalina. I know everyone’s experience is different, but 10.15.x was the buggiest OS I’ve used in years…
There’ve also been many reports of botched upgrades when moving to Catalina straight from Mojave, so that’s just one more reason to avoid it altogether.