Installing Catalina on External SSD

[YonatanKiron]

Hi all,
I'm trying for few days now to install OSX catalina on my External SSD and I want to use it as portable work station.
So, the first question, is it possible? Currently it seems not that trivial to run it on a single PC.

And now for the issue I'm having here.

So I followed the guide but I got stuck on step 4.5.
The Apple logo arrived, but it got stuck for hours on a full bar.
I tried to run in a verbose mode, but it seems like it get stuck earlier, with "PCI configuration end" (Found some threads which didn't lead me to any progress).

My PC specs are:
CPU: Intel i7 8770K
MB: MSI MAG Z390 TOMAHAWK
Memory: CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB
GPU: NVidia RTX 1070
Disk (Not sure if it's relevant):
1. RAID of Intel Optane and HDD
2. Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2
3. External SSD - PNY Pro Elite 250GB USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C <<- The disk I want to install OSX Catalina from and to.

Attached verbose output and EFI dir.
Any help would be amazing, thanks

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Hi all,
I'm trying for few days now to install OSX catalina on my External SSD and I want to use it as portable work station.
So, the first question, is it possible? Currently it seems not that trivial to run it on a single PC.

And now for the issue I'm having here.

So I followed the guide but I got stuck on step 4.5.
The Apple logo arrived, but it got stuck for hours on a full bar.
I tried to run in a verbose mode, but it seems like it get stuck earlier, with "PCI configuration end" (Found some threads which didn't lead me to any progress).

My PC specs are:
CPU: Intel i7 8770K
MB: MSI MAG Z390 TOMAHAWK
Memory: CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB
GPU: NVidia RTX 1070
Disk (Not sure if it's relevant):
1. RAID of Intel Optane and HDD
2. Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2
3. External SSD - PNY Pro Elite 250GB USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C <<- The disk I want to install OSX Catalina from and to.

Attached verbose output and EFI dir.
Any help would be amazing, thanks

Hi there.

Yes, you can certainly install Catalina on an external SSD, mounted in a USB enclosure.

However, if you are running the GTX1070, then Catalina will not recognise it. Neither will Mojave. There are no Nvidia Pascal drivers for these systems. You would be better-off either removing the GTX 1070 and running the iGPU, or changing to an AMD GPU.

The "Plus" and "Pro" versions of the Samsung 970 SSDs can be a bit tricky, however a firmware update usually cures this.

 

[YonatanKiron]

Hi there.

Yes, you can certainly install Catalina on an external SSD, mounted in a USB enclosure.

Thanks for the quick response

However, if you are running the GTX1070, then Catalina will not recognise it. Neither will Mojave. There are no Nvidia Pascal drivers for these systems. You would be better-off either removing the GTX 1070 and running the iGPU, or changing to an AMD GPU.

The "Plus" and "Pro" versions of the Samsung 970 SSDs can be a bit tricky, however a firmware update usually cures this.

I had a mistake, it is RTX 2070, but I assume it's the same issue.

So by saying "Catalina won't recognize it.." do you mean that it might the issue in my installation?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Thanks for the quick response


I had a mistake, it is RTX 2070, but I assume it's the same issue.

So by saying "Catalina won't recognize it.." do you mean that it might the issue in my installation?

Yes.

There are no macOS drivers for the RTX cards, so when the progress bar reaches 75% or so it will then initialise the GPU and switch to it, but if it is unsupported then the result is either a frozen display or a black screen.

You can either run macOS using the iGPU or even disable the RTX using ACPI patching if you don't want to remove it.

 

[YonatanKiron]

Yes.

There are no macOS drivers for the RTX cards, so when the progress bar reaches 75% or so it will then initialise the GPU and switch to it, but if it is unsupported then the result is either a frozen display or a black screen.

You can either run macOS using the iGPU or even disable the RTX using ACPI patching if you don't want to remove it.

Ok, so after I removed the Graphic Card it seems to be stuck at the exact same place.
Any other ideas?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

Ok, so after I removed the Graphic Card it seems to be stuck at the exact same place.
Any other ideas?

What I have told you in post#2 and post#4 is correct.

Your CPU - is it an i7-8700k? Could '8770K' be an error in your profile? - should have an UHD 630 iGPU. There is plenty of guidance in the Graphics section here explaining how to configure this.