Hey All,
Like many others I decided to play with disk utility to create an extra partition to install Win 10 on my iMac 5k late 2014 model. Upon going through the Bootcamp assistant I was met with issues where the boot device could not be created so I just ended up trying to create it manually along with the partition. I ended up trying to create a 120 GB partition and it was taking forever using El Capitano's disk utility. Twice it froze up while creating it and I ended up having to force quit. As you can imagine it was a nightmare and I had a bunch of half created partitions and less spare drive space available. All options in disk utility were grayed out even after booting into network recovery. I don't really use time machine or anything because I frankly don't care as I keep everything I need on my remote server or Google drive. Now, I read lot's of forums where they tell you to boot into recovery and use terminal to erase the partitions and it just seems like a bit of a headache to be honest. Instead of this I did the following to start over completely from scratch. If you're a windows user and you have a bootable Windows USB stick already created just do the following.
Reboot your mac and hold the option key.
Select the windows USB stick as boot device.
When you get to the Windows install options choose Custom.
Now you will see all the partitions that are on your fusion drive and there will be plenty.
I clicked each one and just deleted them until I was just left with the SSD and the regular drive.
Hold Power and shut your Mac down.
Power on and hold option + Command + R to boot into the network Recovery.
After the 10 minutes or so it takes to boot, choose disk utility.
Click on your messed up mac partitions that have been wiped and it will now give you the option to fix and return the drive to it's original fusion state.
Now you can exit disk utility and re-install the OS while still booted into recovery mode.
It will take a while to install that OS since it's downloading it. I had a bootable Yosemite disk already created just in case this crap happened so it saved me an hour and a half.
That's it, once installed the drives were just like before, OS installed on the SSD portion and the rest was available as 1 partition. Hope this helps somebody down the road.
Cheers,
Like many others I decided to play with disk utility to create an extra partition to install Win 10 on my iMac 5k late 2014 model. Upon going through the Bootcamp assistant I was met with issues where the boot device could not be created so I just ended up trying to create it manually along with the partition. I ended up trying to create a 120 GB partition and it was taking forever using El Capitano's disk utility. Twice it froze up while creating it and I ended up having to force quit. As you can imagine it was a nightmare and I had a bunch of half created partitions and less spare drive space available. All options in disk utility were grayed out even after booting into network recovery. I don't really use time machine or anything because I frankly don't care as I keep everything I need on my remote server or Google drive. Now, I read lot's of forums where they tell you to boot into recovery and use terminal to erase the partitions and it just seems like a bit of a headache to be honest. Instead of this I did the following to start over completely from scratch. If you're a windows user and you have a bootable Windows USB stick already created just do the following.
Reboot your mac and hold the option key.
Select the windows USB stick as boot device.
When you get to the Windows install options choose Custom.
Now you will see all the partitions that are on your fusion drive and there will be plenty.
I clicked each one and just deleted them until I was just left with the SSD and the regular drive.
Hold Power and shut your Mac down.
Power on and hold option + Command + R to boot into the network Recovery.
After the 10 minutes or so it takes to boot, choose disk utility.
Click on your messed up mac partitions that have been wiped and it will now give you the option to fix and return the drive to it's original fusion state.
Now you can exit disk utility and re-install the OS while still booted into recovery mode.
It will take a while to install that OS since it's downloading it. I had a bootable Yosemite disk already created just in case this crap happened so it saved me an hour and a half.
That's it, once installed the drives were just like before, OS installed on the SSD portion and the rest was available as 1 partition. Hope this helps somebody down the road.
Cheers,