Hey guys,
I've got some problem with a volume labelled "external" on a Mac Pro 3.1. The volume, an SSD (256 GB) on Apricorn Velocity Solo x1 SSD, plugged in PCIe slot#2 (16 lanes) is labelled "external", hell knows why --> screen attached.
This, normally would not cause any problem, but if I try to install Windows Boot Camp will not recognize this volume for the most obvious reason: the Mac Pro marks it "external".
Now, has anyone of you any idea how Mac's built in Terminal might change the status of this "external" volume to internal?
Firstly, welcome to the forum ! I've not got a great deal of experience with modern macOS, but my own research seems to show that there's no way you can do this from the Terminal. macOS essentially treats these drives as external based on its own hard-wired criteria, and there's nothing you as an end-user can do to change that, unfortunately.
However, some drive manufacturers seem to make macOS kernel extensions available to rectify this exact problem. You'd have to check to see if there is one for this particular SSD (or another compatible module for a different brand of SSD with the same underlying hardware), and if there is, then that module could instruct the kernel to treat this drive as an internal one, and therefore be able to support dual booting. But unless you have some way of getting macOS to change its opinion about this drive, you might be out of luck here I'm afraid.
EDIT
A quick update - there seems to be a generic kext called "Innie" that a third-party developer has written to handle this exact situation. Your Mileage May Vary™, as they say, and of course whether or not you're happy installing code from a 3rd Party into your Mac's kernel is up to you, but this might be your best option.
Is "Windows Boot Camp" a software that is supposed to run on a MacOS (and is it by MS?)?
Or are you talking about installing MS Windows on the device itself?
Either way, at least for the MacOS it might be interesting / important to know what is in:
# Either:
cat /etc/fstab
# Or:
MP=Mount point of where that SSD is mounted to, so we get only 'that' line of the file.
grep $MP /etc/fstab
EDIT:
Ok I was not aware of what @drysdalk said, but maybe there is something we can tweak in fstab regardless.. idk.
well, what can I say but Thank you very much indeed.
Everything worked fine with Innie.kext. I dumped former High Sierra from the SSD, replaced it by Catalina and performed the Terminal commands as suggested in MacRumors Innie: A fix for PCI drives seen as external | MacRumors Forums and this was the result as you might see in the screen attached:
to answer your question: Boot Camp is an implementation of Mac OS supporting Windows installations on Apple/Mac computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Camp_(software) and it was developed by Apple.
My problem has been solved; drysdalk's helpful hint was bull's eye.
