My 2012 Mini boots Catalina fine from various SSD’s but they are not encrypted.
I think that, since Catalina, it has become impossible to boot a Mac from an HFS+ volume.
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.
I had no problems upgrading to Catalina from Mojave and it works fine on a daily basis. It would help to know what specific issues others had as to the “botched upgrades.”
As I said (and we all know), everyone’s experience is different. In my work running a one-man Apple-specific consulting business, I’ve simply seen more issues with trying to get folks upgraded to Catalina than any other recent OS. Especially when moving directly from any OS prior to Mojave, I saw frequent cases of failed installs, often requiring a backup/wipe/restore routine to get past. I obviously have no idea why that would be, but it’s happened all too often in my experience.
A great deal of effort was expended by multiple Enterprise ITs to working with Apple to find the root cause of this issue and a workaround script developed which effectively solved most all such installation problems.
Subsequent Monterey, Big Sur and Catalina installer now check for the situation and resolve it, probably through the use of a pre-install installer script, so the majority of users won’t have any such problems going forward.
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I am now seeing it sometimes with Samsung T-7 and Oyen Digital Helix Dura external SSD bootable clones made with SuperDuper (MacBook Pro 2019 16-inch, Monterey 12.2.1).
On the Desktop it appears with the file name Update but in Disk Utility it has the same name as the volume containing the macOS.
I have just ignored it and otherwise things seem to be fine.
I wish I could provide some type of help in response, but frankly I haven’t touched Monterey drive since David helped me out with diagnosing my diskutil reports I posted awhile back. As far as keeping up with all of the changes in the Mac OS over these last few years, it’s become so complicated to me I just gave up trying to understand it all. If my last iMac hadn’t died, I’d probably still be running OS X Yosemite. I’m thinking of erasing the Monterey drive and trying the upgrade path more slowly starting with Catalina and progressing from there.
Thanks for the offer but as I mentioned, it doesn’t seem to be causing any harm and I have just ignored it.
EDIT: Also, after doing various other tasks on the computer, eventually it has gone away.