😱 YIPE 😱

Big Sur has carried some of the structural reorganizations in Catalina to yet another level of hiding and protection. If you look at the Big Sur boot disk in Disk Utility this is all you see. Notice that ONLY the data volume is mounted and although I have tried, the system volume cannot be mounted. Thanks to Marcel Bresink's TinkerTool System I found the boot disk structure is this. The inability to mount the System volume would account for Carbon Copy Cloner's inability to create a bootable Big Sur clone. (Mike Bombich is going to have fun(❓) working around that "gotcha'.")

I wanted to clone Big Sur so I booted from a Catalina backup and launched CCC only to discover
  1. I could only "see" the Big Sur data volume, even when booted from Catalina. (I'm still working on that)
  2. when I tried to boot back to Big Sur I couldn't see the Big Sur disk as a bootable volume in System Preferences > Startup Disk‼️😫
  3. After some thought 🤔 I had a bright idea 💡and tried an option boot. Still no Big Sur volume but something called "EFI Boot" - which turned out to be Big Sur
I still haven't conjured a way of cloning Big Sur, but at least I am back up and running.

For the sake of clarity I renamed the Big Sur drive "Big Sur" and now the full volume structure of the drive looks like this. Not the name change attached to the Volume Group and the unmountable System volume, but not the Data volume. Damfino what all is going on - yet.

NOTE: Of all changes the only one I am having a problem adapting to is moving files to "the Bin".


"All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance
honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to
fill your head with information"
--Walt Disney