Cannot update macOS Big Sur 11.6 onto external boot drive...

[schmadrian]

Hello, all.

I have a 500Gb SSD external boot drive I am trying to update to 11.6 from 11.2.3

I have tried doing it on my 2019 iMac and my 2013 MBP...obviously, booting from the external drive...and this is the message I consistently get after the downloading has only gotten less than a minute in:

"Download failed. An error occurred downloading the selected update. Please check your Internet connection and try again."

I have successfully updated both of these computers over the past three days, so it's not the actual Internet connection.

Thoughts?

 

[casperes1996]

Try doing it from Terminal and see if you get a better error message, or maybe it just works

sudo softwareupdate -iaR

(I can’t actually remember if sudo is needed, but I think it is for the -R bit)

Flags mean
-i => Install
-a => All
-R => Automatically restart if necessary