mac mini monterey and usb external drives

flatpanel65 wrote:

Thaks for your fast reply

"I'm assuming the USB Flash Disk 124.62GB ("disk3") is the one with the issue?"

Yes, it's a brand new Amazon 128 Gb usb flash usually works on other pc or Mac

That certainly explains it. Return it and get a good name brand USB stick from a respectable vendor. There is a lot of fraudulent products & vendors on the Amazon Marketplace. It is not a safe or reliable place to get quality products even if they are name brand products.....even less so for no-name knock off brands. You are wasting your time with that USB stick.

Yes, the diskutil list output is without disk3 but i confirm that is a good usb flash

How do you know it is good? The "124.62GB" size screams fake. Plus there is absolutely no brand make/model information.

the next step will be to partition the disk with a windows usb stick and then install monterey

I don't understand. Windows cannot be used to create a bootable macOS USB installer. I have yet to see anyone successfully do this. The only reliable way of creating a bootable macOS USB installer is by using the instructions in the following Apple article which requires a Mac compatible with the OS installer you want to create:

Create a bootable installer for macOS - Apple Support

For example, to create a bootable macOS 12. x Monterey USB installer requires a Mac model generally from 2015 to mid-2022. You can confirm macOS & hardware compatibility by using the information in the following article:

https://eshop.macsales.com/guides/Mac_OS_X_Compatibility

Your other options are to create a bootable macOS 10.10 USB installer using another Mac from 2007 to 2015.

You can also use Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R to access the online macOS installer....for a 2014 Mac Mini this should be the macOS 12.x installer. However, some Macs will only boot to the online installer for the version of macOS which originally shipped on the computer from the factory which for the Mac Mini 2014 will be macOS 10.10 Yosemite or perhaps macOS 10.11 El Capitan.

the strange thing is that if I try to reinstall monterey with a bootable usb stick I don't see the 2TB disk

in my opinion the problem is the upgrade from yosemite to monterey with the transition from HFS to APFS because with yosemite I see the USB sticks and the disks

With macOS 10.13+, Disk Utility defaults only to a "volume" view so it won't show the physical drives anymore. Within Disk Utility click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.

macOS 10.10 & 10.11 don't know anything about APFS volumes so it may see those partitions as unknown types. Both should display the physical drives on the left pane of Disk Utility.

I'm assuming the USB Flash Disk 124.62GB ("disk3") is the one with the issue?

124GB is a very odd size for a USB stick or SD Card. That may indicate a hardware issue with that USB stick or it is a fake USB stick.

So you are saying you don't even see the physical drive for the USB stick when using "diskutil list"?

How was this USB stick last used? The EtreCheck sees some sort of partition, but the file system is unknown. I know macOS can get confused when a drive is used for some things (usually boot drives). Usually repartitioning the drive on Windows will fix it as will writing zeroes to the beginning of the drive using "dd" which destroys the existing partition table that macOS does not like.

The 124.62GB size of the drive shown here makes me think there is a hardware issue with this drive. Either a bad drive or a fake drive. Unfortunately many people (third parties) are selling fake devices these days so this is always a real possibility.