No Fallback Recovery Drive in Monterey M1 Silicon Mac Studio

TidBITS Talk
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Can’t Find Fallback Recovery Drive in Monterey M1 Silicon Mac

Details below
thanks in advance very much for your time and help

Reference

Why your M1 may not have Fallback Recovery yet – The Eclectic Light Company

Mac OS

Monterey 12.6.2 which has been updated multiples times after the initial migration

Hardware

Mac Studio 2022

The theory

  • M1 Macs w Monterey should have a have Fallback Recovery OS
  • there are 2 methods to confirm the presence of a fallback recovery OS (via Finder or via Terminal Command as described below)
  • It can happen that the fallback recovery OS is missing after the first installation / migration of Mac OS, but subsequent Mac OS update should generate the Fallback Recovery OS

My problem: the Fallback Recovery OS was absent after I first migrated to the new Mac Studio, which could be normal. I expected it to be generated after the next update. After 2 updates, still no Fallback Recovery OS

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Looking for the Fallback Recovery Drive and what I found

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via Terminal Command

ls /System/Volumes/iSCPreboot/C8858560-55AC-400F-BBB9-C9220A8DAC0D/LocalPolicy/

output : No such file or directory

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Using the Finder Method

From the The Eclectic Light Company article referenced above

In the Finder, you can check whether it has been created and enabled by browsing from Macintosh HD > System > Volumes > iSCPreboot. There look for a folder named with the UUID C8858560-55AC-400F-BBB9-C9220A8DAC0D. That’s almost certainly going to be the only volume starting with C88.

No C88 Folder found.

2023-01-15_14-14-04

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My Monterey Mac Studio’s “ISCPreboot” folder has no folder prefixed “C88…” but it has numerous folders with similarly formatted names that contain “Local Policy” folders, themselves containing *.img4 files. It definitely boots into Fallback Recovery by the push-release-push-hold method as described by Master Eclectic Light.

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thank you very much !

Your explanation makes perfect sense. Just out of curiosity, why would it not be seen by the terminal command ?

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Because the command:

ls /System/Volumes/iSCPreboot/C8858560-55AC-400F-BBB9-C9220A8DAC0D/LocalPolicy/

Is looking for the specific folder “C8858560-55AC-400F-BBB9-C9220A8DAC0D” which is not there, as you observed.

I am presuming that one (or more) of the several folders with that naming convention are serving the same function. I have always assumed that files and folders with names like that are spontaneously generated by the system, and thus the system could have updated and changed the relevant names. It is worth noting that the article you cited is almost a year old.

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Yes, now it all makes sense. Thank you VERY much !