What would be the cleanest method of converting the APFS macOS partition back to HFS+

apfsboothfs+high sierrapartition

After installing High Sierra when it was released, I was initially happy with APFS and gave no care to its relative novelty. Recently I've been using Linux, macOS, and Windows, and having to reboot back into macOS just to grab a file and then copy it to my Windows or Linux partitions is becoming inconvenient and tedious, not to mention a waste of space. I decided that I'd make the attempt to convert my macOS partition back to HFS+. Here are the steps I've taken so far:

Made a full backup of my internal drive using gdd. I've tested this backup and am writing this booted off of it.
Installed macOS High Sierra onto a disk drive (thereby keeping it HFS+).
Copied all of my macOS files onto this drive using sudo cp -a (Target Disk Mode).
Written this HFS+ partition over my APFS partition (gparted-live).
Transferred the Apple_Boot partition to immediately after the HFS+ partition on my internal drive (Target Disk Mode).
Attempted to boot off of my internal drive.

The resulting HFS+ partition appears as a bootable drive in the hold-Option-at-boot menu, and when I attempt to boot it (verbosely), it throws tons of warnings/errors along the lines of kernel[0]: ... dyld_shared_cache_x86_64': owned by uid=89 instead of 0, then infinitely outputs Process[32] crashed: opendirectoryd. Too many corpses being created (number ranging from about 30 to about 150) and increments the number. After powercycling multiple times it now outputs Waiting for DSMOS before the infinite loop.

Here is a diskutil list of my internal drive:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS macOS                   169.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot                         600.8 MB   disk0s3
   4:           Linux Filesystem                         31.5 GB    disk0s4
   5:                 Linux Swap                         8.5 GB     disk0s5
   6:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                40.8 GB    disk0s6

Given all this, what would be the cleanest way for me to accomplish converting my macOS partition to HFS+, keeping in mind I can start over if needed?

Best Answer

Once you formatted an HDD as an APFS volume it is not easy to get back to HFS+. I made the experience when I formatted an external 10 TB backup disk as APFS just to decide that maybe HFS+ would be better for my usage scenario. When I tried to reformat the HDD, the HFS+ version was gone from diskutil. I had to erase the complete volume structure and as soon as I did this, I was able to format as HFS+.

So I guess you will have to go through this too.

Full backup (time machine, carbon copy, ...)
Following my experience I would say to completely erase the volume structure of your internal HDD, through target disk mode or while booted into the recovery partition of an external USB drive.
Reinstall
Restore

Good luck!

With other words: I would say there is no way of avoiding a complete erase and reconfiguration of the whole volume structure + reinstall.

The “too many corpses” hinds at a corruption of your account/machine setting. If it is the user account you could try to create a new user:

Start with ⌘-S
Check the startup disk:/sbin/fsck -fy
Mount the startup disk using: /sbin/mount -uw /
Remove the setup complete flag using: rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
Install macOS and create a new user.
Copy your data to the new user.

If it is a machine setting related problem: erase, etc..

Related Solutions

MacOS – Resetting MBR on iMac

Boot from an install DVD or USB key (If you have one).

From the first installer page choose Disk Utility from the Tools menu.

Check to see if it finds your partition.

Verify/Repair it.

Then, from Tools, choose Startup Disk, and see if you can set your system partition.

If you don't have an install DVD or USB key there are plenty of instructions around on how to do it.

iPartition can change partition schemes without wiping the disk if it comes to that. It's a great tool to have, I've used it a lot for various disk activities over the years, with Linux, Windows, and OSX partitions.

You need a GUID disk to boot OSX normally, not sure how you had it working with an MBR. Disk Utility will normally tell you what you have and how to correct it, if it can.

Long story short - make sure you back up your disk, you're probably going to be reformatting it.

MacOS – Uninstall rEFInd 0.8-3.7 on Yosemite

Note: El Capitan (OS X 10.11) prevents users from selecting rEFInd and common Linux distributions from the Startup Disk pane. The new preferred method is to install rEFInd into the an EFI partition. My answer, to an unrelated question, outlines this new preferred method to start the rEFInd Boot Manager and Linux operating systems. The answer, given below, applies to Yosemite (OS X 10.10) and possibly earlier versions of OS X.

Personally, I installed rEFInd on my computer to its own partition. This prevents the problems you are encountering. Everything ./install.sh installed went to this partition. If I want to remove rEFInd, I can simply erase or remove the partition. Of course both are unnecessary, because I can turn rEFInd on and off at will. I just go to the Startup window in System Preferences select my boot partition. This computer has OS X, Windows, Fedora and rEFInd installed.

I also can select the boot partition under Windows by using BootCamp and by holding the Option key down at startup. The command diskutil list produces:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Marlin                  300.0 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data Coelacanth              98.9 GB    disk0s4
   5:                  Apple_HFS Linux HFS+ ESP          209.7 MB   disk0s5
   6: 0FC63DAF-8483-4772-8E79-3D69D8477DE4               524.3 MB   disk0s6
   7:                  Linux LVM                         98.6 GB    disk0s7
   8:                  Apple_HFS rEFInd                  939.5 MB   disk0s8

Note, the rEFInd partition is ~ 1 GB in size. In fact, it can be as small as 100 MB. When I setup this computer, I used the Disk Utility application to create the rEFInd partition. If I would have used the gpt command, I could have created a smaller partition. Neither OS X, Windows, Fedora nor rEFInd use the EFI partition to boot the computer. In fact, there is nothing useful in the EFI partition.

Answer to your questions:

How do I uninstall rEFInd 0.8-3.7 using OS X 10.10.3? Read the ./install.sh file and undo whatever it did. I should of had you run the commands bless --info and bless --info --getBoot. These would have told where the .efi file was stored. Note: Almost everyone installs rEFInd to the OS X boot partition.

How would I go and reinstall it using different options if I cannot remove it? The author of the software never said rEFInd could not be removed. I suggested you just install it again to its own partition. This might be a good place to mention the gpt command has to be run while either booted to an external recover partition or while booted to internet recovery.

Could I simply remove the EFI partition or would that corrupt my Mac? Do not remove the EFI partition! It is not used to boot OS X, but it is used by OS X for other things.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Resetting MBR on iMac

MacOS – Uninstall rEFInd 0.8-3.7 on Yosemite

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