Re: Startup Disk disagrees with restart options, and restart options is right

Having no other real solutions, nuke and pave is in that WD 4TB drive's 
future.

I have an Early 2013 MBP (Retina) w 16GB Ram running High Sierra 10.13.3 
now.

The internal ssd is an early OWC Aura 1TB. I have the old original Apple 
ssd in the external aluminum case. Both have High Sierra and can boot. 
It took a couple days to get that far.

I have three WD 2.5" Rotating Memory Drives [RMD] (My, how that old old 
name has returned to haunt), an Ultra 4TB in a shiny case, and a 4TB and 
2TB in those new black cases. The Ultra 4TB drive has a boot partition, 
a Boot Camp partition and a Time Machine partition; it got corrupted 
after a year of service so it's sitting there until everything else has 
settled down. The 2TB drive is new, has just a bootable partition and 
does boot, tho it can take a while (for as yet unknown reasons). That 
apple progress bar crawls. The 2TB is I believe APFS.

The 4TB drive is new, and is HFS+. It was set up to be the second backup 
drive to take over from the Ultra, and so has the boot partition, Boot 
Camp backup, and Time Machine partition, but it doesn't boot.

According to OWC, my combination of 1TB OWC ssd and Retina MBP laptop is 
the one combination that wasn't supposed to have weird problems that the 
other combinations apparently have suffered from. I didn't need a 
firmware update before installing High Sierra, and I'm not supposed to 
be experiencing wacky slow behavior and odd problems with external 
drives not booting when they should be able to.

I have a work machine that is about the same as the home machine, and 
the drives behave the same, so I actually don't think the current 
internal ssd is causing hiccups for boot time. The work machine is still 
on Sierra.

More as I make it up. I'm now working on backing up the NTFS 
partition(s) so I can wipe the drive(s).

Mike