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MP 1,1-5,1 How to format SSD with APFS?

choreo

choreo

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 10, 2008
910
357
Midland, TX
I am in a real jam this time. I have been running High Sierra on an internal SSD (on a PCI card) in my 2012 Mac Pro for several weeks now, but today I received a notification from the App Store that I should update my software. When I chose to update, the updater ran and the Mac restarted and then just blank screens! Bottom line is I have all my files backed up both in Time Machine and to an external firewire drive. Unfortunately I cannot choose to reformat my internal SSD with APFS from Disk Utility as it does not show as an option unless I am booted from High Sierra?

Any ideas?
 
So neither of your backups are truely bootable. You are seeing the disadvantage of this first hand. These days it is an extremely good idea to have at least one bootable source because your data backup, although very valuable of course will not allow you to repair your HD.
The good news is that you can boot your device with Time Machine but only into the Recovery Partition.
If you start your device from off, with your Time Machine backup connected and hold down the option key until you hear the tone you will find yourself in Recovery mode.
From here you can try reinstalling your macOS which can take a long time. You can also attempt to repair the HD using Disk Utility.
At worst you can reinstal the original macOS and upgrade from there via the app store to High Sierra. Upgrading via the High Sierra installer will also give you the option to change the filing system to APFS.
Oh, I should have asked this originally but have you tried booting your device into recovery mode on the device? You just boot while holding the R key until the Apple logo appears. This is the same window you should see using Time Machine Recovery.
 
choreo said:
I am in a real jam this time. I have been running High Sierra on an internal SSD (on a PCI card) in my 2012 Mac Pro for several weeks now, but today I received a notification from the App Store that I should update my software. When I chose to update, the updater ran and the Mac restarted and then just blank screens! Bottom line is I have all my files backed up both in Time Machine and to an external firewire drive. Unfortunately I cannot choose to reformat my internal SSD with APFS from Disk Utility as it does not show as an option unless I am booted from High Sierra?

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Your Time Machine backup drive is bootable into recovery mode. Its recovery boot should contain the latest version of macOS that you were backing up to it—that is, High Sierra.

Start your Mac, wait for the chime, then immediately press and hold the Option key. Your Time Machine drive should appear in the list of bootable drives that shows on the screen. You can then boot to that, re-initialize your drive with Disk Utility, and restore your backup.

Please post back and let us know how this works out. (I’m curious why your system got hosed by the update, but it might have just been a fluke.)
 
Last edited:
Well I finally got back up and running but I can't fully explain how?

I did not try rebooting using the "R" key - I had forgotten about that option at the time - that may have worked?

I did get Disk Utility as an option on one restart when I held down the Option key, but one of the two SSD drives on my PCI card (the one with my HS boot volume) showed up as APFS and everything greyed out for that drive - so I could not perform any operations on it? It also showed as NO DATA on the drive 499GB Available on my 500GB drive.

What I finally decided to do was try to reboot using my HS Installer USB Stick and my plan was to install a fresh copy of HS on my second internal SSD drive - then use Time Machine to migrate all my backed up files. However, after the HS Installer did its thing, it went ahead and rebooted without giving me the option to restore files at install time. Then for some reason my dead original boot volume reappeared perfectly in-tact on the desktop too! So I reset my Startup Disk to my old boot drive in System Preferences an restarted. EVERYTHING went back to normal with all my settings!

After that mystery, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a complete clone of my original (and current) boot SSD to my second internal SSD and put it on a daily auto back-up.

I still do not know why my Carbon Copy Cloner copy of my boot drive on my external Firewire Hard Drive would not boot my machine when I ran into trouble? Maybe there is something about cloning between APFS and HFS+ that just does not work for booting purposes?
 
choreo

When you did the CCC clone did you have " Safety Net " set to OFF ? My 10.14.6 ( build 218G022 )HFS+ clone boots OK, no discernible problems.
 
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