Yesterday I finally upgraded my mid-2009 Macbook from Yosemite to El Capitan 10.11.1. I had been waiting for some third-party software compatibility updates to show up, plus I was a little apprehensive given my experience upgrading from Mavericks to Yosemite, thus the delay.
Some of you may recall how Yosemite forced some systems onto Core Storage without any seemingly good reason. My system was one of those affected, and it was made worse by my "non-standard" partition map, my system being a triple boot with OS X, Linux, and Windows. My system has four partitions: EFI, OS X, Linux, Windows. It's a hybrid partition table, and I use rEFInd to manage my booting. Note that I have no Recovery partition, having previously gone straight from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, which didn't bother creating a Recovery HD. Unfortunately this setup confused the Yosemite installer, failing with a message saying that it would make my "Windows partition unbootable". I was able to force the install by temporarily converting to Core Storage with a Recovery partition, my method described previously on this forum.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-up-partitions.1741742/page-13#post-20559025
So one reason I waited to install El Capitan was that I wanted to have time to spend a few hours on the upgrade, in case I needed to play with Core Storage again. Good thing I waited.
I downloaded the 10.11.1 installer from the Mac App Store, and used "createinstallmedia" on an external USB HD to make an installer, which I booted to start the install. I chose my Macbook disk as the target, which was the point in the Yosemite install where I had got the "unbootable" warning. With El Capitan, though, the message merely warned that on that disk I would be unable to use FileVault or Recovery, which was certainly true, and fine with me, so I had it continue the install, figuring that Apple must have fixed the bug that was in the Yosemite installer. Eventually it got to the point where it said it had 10 more minutes in the install, which I thought was fast, but remembered the dreaded "one second remaining, but really many minutes" delay, which happened as usual before rebooting.
When it rebooted, though, I was surprised that there was a second stage for the install, with 30 minutes remaining, and it was at this point where I finally got the "Windows partition unbootable" message. Darn it! The install bug is still there. Even though it had explicitly said it wouldn't create a Recovery, and Recovery wasn't really necessary anyway, it apparently still wanted to create one, tripping over on my "full" partition table.
So I booted back into Yosemite and once again used "diskutil cs convert /" to turn it into a Core Storage partition, rebooting to confirm. The I booted the external install again, this time not getting any "FileVault/Recovery" warning, and the install went straight into the main 30-minute process, no "unbootable" complaints. When it was done, I had 10.11.1 installed on my Macbook (hurrah), but also a Core Storage volume and Recovery partition, messing up my multiboot (boo).
(The first 10.11 boot did not go smoothly, hanging for many minutes during the boot, until I rebooted into Safe Mode, which succeeded, and subsequent normal boots were successful.)
The Recovery partition has a new use in 10.11, so I booted into Recovery so I could disable "rootless", and while there used "diskutil cs revert" to change the OS X partition back to normal. That left me with a "worse than useless" Recovery partition.
After a normal boot, I then used "hdiutil create ~/Desktop/RecoveryHD_10_11_1.dmg -srcdevice" to image the Recovery, so I could put it on a different device if I ever needed it. (It even works on a CD, though it takes a half-hour to boot!) Then I got rid of the Recovery partition, no longer using Linux gparted, but having since learned how to do it in OS X.
diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank RecoveryPartitionDevice
diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ "OSXDisk" OSXPartitionDevice RecoveryPartitionDevice
Reboot again, re-install rEFInd, and my triple boot is restored, with the Fusion VM partition mappings not even needing to be redefined. Partitions all back to normal.
I'm disappointed that Apple apparently only tried to fix the Yosemite install bug, without actually fixing it. Probably two separate teams, one on the installer UI (who added the "FileVault/Recovery" warning), one on the actual install (who forgot to remove the Recovery requirement).
Not Core Storage related: One side effect of the upgrade was an Apple ID login hang, that many others are experiencing. For some it's an invalid serial number problem, but not me, and the command to reset the App Store accounting (after "or try this" in the post) worked for me.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/29201171#29201171
Some of you may recall how Yosemite forced some systems onto Core Storage without any seemingly good reason. My system was one of those affected, and it was made worse by my "non-standard" partition map, my system being a triple boot with OS X, Linux, and Windows. My system has four partitions: EFI, OS X, Linux, Windows. It's a hybrid partition table, and I use rEFInd to manage my booting. Note that I have no Recovery partition, having previously gone straight from Snow Leopard to Mavericks, which didn't bother creating a Recovery HD. Unfortunately this setup confused the Yosemite installer, failing with a message saying that it would make my "Windows partition unbootable". I was able to force the install by temporarily converting to Core Storage with a Recovery partition, my method described previously on this forum.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...w-up-partitions.1741742/page-13#post-20559025
So one reason I waited to install El Capitan was that I wanted to have time to spend a few hours on the upgrade, in case I needed to play with Core Storage again. Good thing I waited.
I downloaded the 10.11.1 installer from the Mac App Store, and used "createinstallmedia" on an external USB HD to make an installer, which I booted to start the install. I chose my Macbook disk as the target, which was the point in the Yosemite install where I had got the "unbootable" warning. With El Capitan, though, the message merely warned that on that disk I would be unable to use FileVault or Recovery, which was certainly true, and fine with me, so I had it continue the install, figuring that Apple must have fixed the bug that was in the Yosemite installer. Eventually it got to the point where it said it had 10 more minutes in the install, which I thought was fast, but remembered the dreaded "one second remaining, but really many minutes" delay, which happened as usual before rebooting.
When it rebooted, though, I was surprised that there was a second stage for the install, with 30 minutes remaining, and it was at this point where I finally got the "Windows partition unbootable" message. Darn it! The install bug is still there. Even though it had explicitly said it wouldn't create a Recovery, and Recovery wasn't really necessary anyway, it apparently still wanted to create one, tripping over on my "full" partition table.
So I booted back into Yosemite and once again used "diskutil cs convert /" to turn it into a Core Storage partition, rebooting to confirm. The I booted the external install again, this time not getting any "FileVault/Recovery" warning, and the install went straight into the main 30-minute process, no "unbootable" complaints. When it was done, I had 10.11.1 installed on my Macbook (hurrah), but also a Core Storage volume and Recovery partition, messing up my multiboot (boo).
(The first 10.11 boot did not go smoothly, hanging for many minutes during the boot, until I rebooted into Safe Mode, which succeeded, and subsequent normal boots were successful.)
The Recovery partition has a new use in 10.11, so I booted into Recovery so I could disable "rootless", and while there used "diskutil cs revert" to change the OS X partition back to normal. That left me with a "worse than useless" Recovery partition.
After a normal boot, I then used "hdiutil create ~/Desktop/RecoveryHD_10_11_1.dmg -srcdevice" to image the Recovery, so I could put it on a different device if I ever needed it. (It even works on a CD, though it takes a half-hour to boot!) Then I got rid of the Recovery partition, no longer using Linux gparted, but having since learned how to do it in OS X.
diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank RecoveryPartitionDevice
diskutil mergePartitions HFS+ "OSXDisk" OSXPartitionDevice RecoveryPartitionDevice
Reboot again, re-install rEFInd, and my triple boot is restored, with the Fusion VM partition mappings not even needing to be redefined. Partitions all back to normal.
I'm disappointed that Apple apparently only tried to fix the Yosemite install bug, without actually fixing it. Probably two separate teams, one on the installer UI (who added the "FileVault/Recovery" warning), one on the actual install (who forgot to remove the Recovery requirement).
Not Core Storage related: One side effect of the upgrade was an Apple ID login hang, that many others are experiencing. For some it's an invalid serial number problem, but not me, and the command to reset the App Store accounting (after "or try this" in the post) worked for me.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/29201171#29201171