Troubleshooting Startups Will Work Differently in Apple Silicon Macs

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2020/06/25/troubleshooting-startups-will-work-differently-in-apple-silicon-macs/

There are big changes coming to how you invoke various startup modes on Apple Silicon Macs, but the good news is that you won’t have to remember obscure keyboard combinations.

Thanks, Josh.

It’s not obvious to me what advantage replacing TDM with SMB sharing has. Obviously, SMB sharing is a nice addition, but I’d have preferred TDM sticking around around for those special cases where SMB sharing over a network won’t do.

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The other startup mode changes sound good but I don’t like the loss of Target Disk Mode (TDM). Having more or less direct access to the internal drive is so much faster and allows you to use a variety of tools. Apple discourages boot drive cloning but as long as the destination drive already had all the firmware updates installed during OS updates, it still worked in TDM (at least booting from an external drive is still supported).

The article also mentions the Apple processor Macs will have a Recovery-Recovery OS (presumably in an uber-firmware, separate from the internal drive) instead of Internet Recovery. I think I only used Internet Recovery once, to install an OS on an older machine that I didn’t have a handy installer for.

Sorry, but would somebody clarify what SMB stands for?

Server Message Block. A network protocol. What Apple has relied on for macOS file sharing since they’ve deprecated AFP.

A mouthful. Very interesting. Thank you

Is there a ‘recovery’ mode for iPhones? I’ve not heard of this before. I just shut my iPhone down and held in the lowers button during startup. All this seemed to do was to abort the startup while the Apple logo was still on screen, and shut the phone down again. Is there any more info on iPhone recovery mode?

Yes. See If you can't update or restore your iPhone or iPod touch - Apple Support for how to start in recovery.

Ah, thanks. I thought maybe there was some kind of (untethered) recovery mode like on MacOS, where I would get a screen for running a repair or re-installing iOS over the internet.