BigSur boot

[adiantek]

Hi,

I installed catalina, upgraded to Big Sur. After shut down and start I see macOS Utilities (recovery):

I must click "Startup disk" and select "macOS - Data" to run MacOS BigSur. How can I change to automatically and always boot "macOS - Data"?

[myspaghetti]

You can change the boot disk in any of these ways:

• Change the startup disk in Apple menu > System Preferences > Startup Disk.
• Press [Option] (⌥) or [Alt] on startup to get to the boot selection screen, then hold down (I think) [Ctrl] and press [Enter] to set the desired boot disk.
• Eject the macOS Base System from the VirtualBox virtual machine so the boot sequence skips it.
• If you're using VirtualBox 5.2, press [Esc] when the virtual machine powers up, boot the EFI Internal Shell, and edit startup.nsh so it points to the desired boot.efi file. This also works on newer versions of VirtualBox if the NVRAM points to the wrong efi boot file.

You only need to perform one of these.

[adiantek]

1) I had it before: 3) I removed Catalina_bootable_installer.vdi and got panic from MacOS 4) There is my startup.nsh - what I should change? and run fs5:\System\Library\CoreServices\boot.efi: it's the same crash which I got when I removed Catalina_bootable_installer.vdi.

My VBox version: Oracle VM VirtualBox VM Selector v6.1.22_Ubuntu. My extpacks:

vboxmanage list extpacks
Extension Packs: 2
Pack no. 0:   Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack
Version:      6.1.22
Revision:     144080
Edition:      
Description:  Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 Host Controller, Host Webcam, VirtualBox RDP, PXE ROM, Disk Encryption, NVMe.
VRDE Module:  VBoxVRDP
Usable:       true 
Why unusable: 

Pack no. 1:   VNC
Version:      6.1.22
Revision:     144080
Edition:      
Description:  VNC plugin module
VRDE Module:  VBoxVNC
Usable:       true 
Why unusable: 

[myspaghetti]

Since Big Sur boots with the Catalina installer disk attached but fails if it's the only disk, the problem is definitely minor and probably somewhere in com.apple.Boot.plist. However if you don't feel like delving into macOS boot internals, you can try:

• Permanently attaching an empty HFS disk so Big Sur is the second disk again.
• Keeping the installer attached and editing the second and third run (1 5) to run (2 5) or run (3 5) so it skips the first one or two disks (I can't remember if the installer has an EFI partition; I think it doesn't so you only need to skip one partition in the EFI Internal Shell).

The proper solution would be fixing Big Sur's boot settings, or, if the VM has nothing on it, deleting the VM and making a new one, then upgrading to Big Sur when it's the only attached bootable disk so the boot sequence doesn't get complicated. Another way, if you still have the Big Sur installer on the disk, is manually creating another 12GB virtual disk and creating a Big Sur installer on it, then using that installer to fix the boot sequence.

Again, the problem is probably very minor and I'm giving these hacky solutions so I don't have to look into com.apple.Boot.plist, but it's probably the source of the issue and it's probably very simple to fix it.