MacOS – How to Format APFS drive using a PC so I can replace the Mac drive

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I have an older iMac (Late 2012, A1418) that has a defective hard drive. I need to replace the drive and put in a fresh OS (Catalina).

I have the install media on a USB flash drive. My problem is that the drive needs to be formatted APFS and to do this I need another Mac running High Sierra which I don’t have.

Is there a way to format an external disk to APFS using a PC?

Best Answer

To answer your question, there are good windows software package to read and write to APFS, however you don’t need this and none seem to allow partitioning or setup like you ask.

The stand alone installer knows enough to run Disk Utilty and prep a drive, so you don’t need a formatted drive. When you run the installer it will detect the bare drive and offer to erase, format, partition and install the OS.

Just boot up the installer and connect the new drive. It can be internally connected or externally connected and the installer will do the correct erase and format for you.

Your Mac might even be able to boot to internet recovery to get Disk Utility to partition the disk with zero local bootable OS or installers. Here is a step by step guide that Apple keeps updated for this procedure.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

Related Solutions

Why was the drive not converted to APFS while installing macOS High Sierra public beta

According to various threads I’ve read, there are a number of factors that may prevent you from converting to APFS:

Third-party SSDs are not supported.
Rotational hard drives and fusion drives were supported in Developer Preview 1, but support was removed in Developer Preview 2 (Public Beta 1) due to catastrophic failures.
FileVault may need to be disabled before the conversion is allowed.
External drives may need to be unmounted.

Using Carbon Copy Cloner 4 to create encrypted bootable HFS+ clones from APFS source

Here's what worked

Download the High Sierra installer from the App Store.
Run the installer, choosing the external clone disk as the target. This will automatically create a new Recovery HD partition associated with the target disk.
Reboot from the external disk. Hold down option key during startup to select the boot disk.
Enable FileVault encryption as usual from the Security & Privacy panel in System Preferences.

Additional Notes

You can reboot from your internal drive for better performance, after enabling FileVault on the external. The encryption task will continue as long as you're plugged into power and the external disk is connected.
It may take several hours, or even days, before encryption is done, depending on the volume of data to be encrypted.
You can view encryption task progress using the Terminal command diskutil cs list

What didn't work

There are some articles posted about how to clone the internal disk Recovery HD volume to any other drive, but I didn't have success with them:

$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         499.4 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +499.4 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Mac-HD                  431.9 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 22.9 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                518.8 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

$ sudo hdiutil create ~/Desktop/Recovery_HD.dmg -srcdevice /dev/disk1s3
hdiutil: create failed - No such file or directory

I didn't find any articles that specifically addressed the case where the source disk is APFS format.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Why was the drive not converted to APFS while installing macOS High Sierra public beta

Using Carbon Copy Cloner 4 to create encrypted bootable HFS+ clones from APFS source

Related Question