If you have a 3TB Fusion Drive, help! Please!

[gagecloutier]

I'll try to keep this short. Like an infinite amount of others who have a 3TB HDD or 3TB Fusion Drive, I have had an absolute nightmare trying to get Windows 7 installed. Boot Camp Assistant locked up while partitioning my Fusion Drive and I was left with a hidden/corrupted Windows partition. The only way to fix it was to boot off of the recovery drive and wipe everything off the partition, break the Fusion Drive, and "fix" it via Disk Utility when I prompted me to.

TLDR; I feel that it repartitioned/"fixed" my drive oddly. For you all with 3TB Fusion Drives, will you please take a screenshot of what your hard drives/partitions look like in Disk Utility? Mine seems odd because it renamed "Macintosh HD" to "Internal Drive" automatically (I didn't get the opportunity to rename it) and it says 0 Bytes available, as seen in the first screenshot. Yet, when I click on the actual Mac formatted "Macintosh HD" partition, it looks much more normal and says it has 3.11TB capacity (second screenshot). Is this normal? I never took the time to look at DU prior to going through all of this Boot Camp nonsense. Please take two screenshots for me in Disk Utility clicking where I did if you have a 3TB Fusion Drive so I can compare. Thank you!

Also, if the structure of the Logical Volume Group (Fusion Drive) looks correct, do you know of any way to rename the hard drive, NOT the partition through the Terminal or something? I know through practical means it's not possible. My OCD does not like it being named "Internal Drive" though, I want it to be "Macintosh HD" like it was out of the box. Small quirk, I know, but that's how I am.

 

[AppleNewton]

Internal Drive is just how OS X names it now. it could have been an OS X update, but initially my fusion drive was Macintosh HD, but now its Internal Drive. So nothing wrong there actually.

 

[gagecloutier]

Internal Drive is just how OS X names it now. it could have been an OS X update, but initially my fusion drive was Macintosh HD, but now its Internal Drive. So nothing wrong there actually.

Really? I'll be damned. Would you mind taking two screenshots for me in DU, pretty pretty pretty please?

 

[AppleNewton]

lol, np...its quite alright OS X does things for a reason, so no need to worry about it. Its a fairly selfaware and robust OS.

 

[gagecloutier]

lol, np...its quite alright OS X does things for a reason, so no need to worry about it. Its a fairly selfaware and robust OS.

Awesome! Now I can sleep tonight without driving myself insane XD. Sorry, one last question: On your "Internal Drive," does it say 0 Byes Available (see first screenshot) for you as well, even though it's all allocated as 3.11TB under "Macintosh HD?" (second screenshot) That's what mine says and I thought the botched Boot Camp install caused it.

 

[AppleNewton]

Yep, 0 Bytes.

When you think about why it says that, its not an actual partition that would hold data and is just the structure of the volume so there technically shouldnt be any data taken up..some may have a few bytes used for volume data info, or something along those lines.

your fusion drive/imac is fine...dont look too far into things with OS X, most likely its normal and fine.

 

[gagecloutier]

Yep, 0 Bytes.

When you think about why it says that, its not an actual partition that would hold data and is just the structure of the volume so there technically shouldnt be any data taken up..some may have a few bytes used for volume data info, or something along those lines.

your fusion drive/imac is fine...dont look too far into things with OS X, most likely its normal and fine.

Conceptually, it makes sense why the "Internal Drive" itself doesn't have any space available, because all of its available capacity is being allocated towards the Macintosh HD partition. I just wasn't used to seeing that way with Macs I've owned in the past and my 15" rMBP. Good to know though that all Fusion Drives look like that and mine's 100% back in order from that Boot Camp disaster. Whatever you do, DO NOT attempt to install Windows 7 (I think Windows 8 is OK though, pretty sure that's what 10.8.3 addressed but they didn't specify whether it was for 7 or 8, which would've been immensely helpful and could've helped prevent this issue) on a 3TB drive. It was a mess.

Thanks for your help!

P.S. While I still have you, since we seem to have identical 27" iMacs, when you Option Boot, does your Recovery partition "Recovery HD" show up? I noticed on my 15" rMBP, it does, but on my 27" iMac it doesn't. However, if I hold Cmd + R, it boots to the recovery partition. Is the inaccessibility of the recovery partition through the EFI Option Boot a new thing that Apple's introduced in the Late 2012 iMacs?

 

[AppleNewton]

Since the fusion drive is a logical volume, correct the Recovery partition will not be shown. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790

Command R is the best method to access it. so all is good on your end.

 

[TheTekGuy123]

Hello,

I'm having exactly the same issue as you did. Bootcamp messed up my Windows partition and now it's corrupt. I can't delete it or repartition my drive.

If you don't mind, could you please post the steps you took to get rid of the windows partition in slightly more detail to help me.

Thanks

 

[Dopeyman]

I have a couple of questions....

1) Is this only for the 3TB fusion drives? Or for a normal 3TB drive as well?
2) Does this affect the 2012-2013 iMacs only?

I ask these questions cause I just purchased a 3TB hard drive for my 2011 27" iMac... I don't plan on creating a fusion... It'll just be as "storage" while I use my SSD as my startup..