APFS Accidentally converted on WD Black2 (Fusion)

[titaniumjones]

I seem to have accidentally converted my drive format to APFS. A few years ago I installed a WD Black2 Dual drive. This all worked great. Recently, I began to notice that the boot took a long time and would stop at about 75% complete, eventually finishing and booting normally. After a bit of poking around I noticed that the format of the partitions were now in APFS format. The OS seems to recognise the drive as an SSD and has converted it to APFS.

I'm not sure what to do now.

Any advice?

 

[Fishrrman]

It would sure help if you told us WHAT KIND OF MAC you have.

The WD black drive is installed internally?
And it's your regular boot drive?

To get rid of APFS, this is how I'd do it (which may not be how others do it, but my method would work):

Get an EXTERNAL hard drive, either HDD or SSD.
Use Disk Utility to initialize it to Mac OS extended with journaling enabled (NOT to APFS).

Use CarbonCopyCloner (free to download and use for 30 days) to create a bootable cloned backup of the internal WD drive to the external drive.
YOU MUST MAKE SURE that CCC creates the clone as HFS+ and NOT AS APFS.

Now you have your stuff on a drive which is HFS+ (a fully bootable cloned backup of the internal).

Next, BOOT FROM the bootable cloned backup.

Now, THE IMPORTANT PART:
You need to ERASE the internal drive (the whole thing, recovery partition and all) and NUKE IT BACK TO HFS+.
You MIGHT be able to do this using Disk Utility (i'm not sure, never having tried it myself, I won't touch APFS with a 10-foot-pole).
If DU won't do the job, it can probably be done using the terminal.

Once the drive is back to HFS+, you can then open CCC and "RE-clone" the cloned backup BACK TO the internal drive.

You should now have all your stuff, as it was before, BUT NOW ON AN HFS+ drive, instead of APFS.

This is gonna take some time.
But I believe it WILL "do the job" and do it right.

 

[titaniumjones]

It would sure help if you told us WHAT KIND OF MAC you have.

Sorry, this is a:
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012) i7 2.6GHz 16Gb Ram (3rd Party)
Originally fitted with a 500Gb 5400rpm spinning disk. This was replaced internally with a WD 1TB+128GB HDD+SSD. These were configured into a fusion drive. I'm really surprised that it was converted to APFS due to the 1TB Spinning component.

I was hoping there was an easy way to convert back to HFS+
[doublepost=1523722501][/doublepost]

Use CarbonCopyCloner (free to download and use for 30 days) to create a bootable cloned backup of the internal WD drive to the external drive.

Any thoughts on the BootCamp partition?

 

[dianeoforegon]

Now, THE IMPORTANT PART:
You need to ERASE the internal drive (the whole thing, recovery partition and all) and NUKE IT BACK TO HFS+.

You will need to do this in an High Sierra Recover drive using Disk Utility.

If just select Erase it will not get a container.

First Select Show All from the popup in top left corner.

Didn't keep link for this image for attribution. Sorry.

Check for a container after erasing. You might have to use Terminal to unmount then erase using Terminal.

 

[titaniumjones]

You will need to do this in an High Sierra Recover drive using Disk Utility.

If just select Erase it will not get a container.

First Select Show All from the popup in top left corner.
View attachment 758278

Didn't keep link for this image for attribution. Sorry.
View attachment 758273
Check for a container after erasing. You might have to use Terminal to unmount then erase using Terminal.
View attachment 758277

Thanks
I created CCC copy of the Mac Partition. Currently making a WinClone of the BootCamp.
I'll let you know how it turns out.

 

[titaniumjones]

Well it took some time, but this is the result.

Boots nicely into both Windoze and MacOs