MM 2012 forces me to fuse the drives

[eyepea]

I have an i7 2012 MM with an OCZ Agility 3 and 1TB HDD in it. I am playing around with the setup. Making a fusion drive is very easy, but believe it or not, I CANNOT set it up with plain old SSD as the boot/os drive withe the 1TB for other files. It keeps forcing me to 'fix' the unfused drive. I have tried disk utility in a separate boot drive etc but when I press command-R to do the internet recovery to DL the OS it forces me to fix the unfused drives.

Does anyone have a method to run stand-alone SSD/HDDs on a 2012 MM?


IP

 

[philipma1957]

yeah put in both drives and leave the hdd un plugged . keep the mini upside down with the black plate off. boot and just run the ssd. load the osx to the ssd. then boot the mini again with the ssd and the oem unplugged. then clone the ssd to an external drive. the oem hdd still un plugged.


power mini off un plug the ssd but plug the oem hdd in. then boot the mini make sure the external clone is attached the mini will boot and see the oem hdd format the oem hdd with the clone's disc utility as blank storage drive.
v
power off. attach the ssd the oem hdd stays attached.detach the external clone close up the mini and boot.. keep the external clone as a backup

 

[takiv]

this is what I did per the instructions that came with my OWC Data Doubler kit

It did take some time to download the os as I am on dsl.

Restart your computer and boot to the internal hard drive like normal.
You will likely get a dialog box stating that a drive is “unreadable.” Click the “Initialize” button to open Disk Utility. If you don’t get this warning, you can find Disk Utility at Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
Select the SSD from the list on the left side of the Disk Utility window and Click on the Partition tab.
Select “1 partition” for the Volume Scheme, set the format to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” and give the drive a name. You can then click the “Apply” button to format the drive.
Once the drive is formatted and shows in the Finder, you can then shut down.
Make sure you’re connected to a network. While it’s preferable that you connect via Ethernet, you can connect via AirPort; it will just be slower.
Restart to the OS X Recovery Partition by holding down Command-R until you get the Recovery Partition’s main window. It is very important to note that you should not use the version of Disk Utility in the Recovery Partition; it will see the two separate drives as a “damaged” Fusion drive and try to repair it; allowing it to do so will destroy your data.
Select the option to “Reinstall OS X” choosing the SSD to install the OS on. If you’re connecting via AirPort, you may be prompted to connect to your wireless network.
Follow the prompts to install.The actual downloading and installation process may take a while.
After the OS is installed, follow the prompts to set up your computer. When asked, choose the option to import your data from another drive and select your original drive as the source.
Once the migration is complete, your computer should boot to your SSD.
You can use the Disk Utility like you did before and format your original hard drive as desired.
You will now be able to use your Mac mini normally.

 

[Fishrrman]

"Does anyone have a method to run stand-alone SSD/HDDs on a 2012 MM?"

Yes.

Do not use Disk Utility running on the recovery partition.

At all. EVER.

If you launch DU while booted under the recovery partition, DU will "assume" that because your Mini has both an SSD and an HDD, that it's supposed to have "fusion" enabled.

If fusion is NOT enabled (as in your case), DU will attempt to do an automatic "fix".

If you need to use DU, boot from either "un-fused" drive, or from an external clone.