This volume is not formatted as APFS

Thanks to everyone for comments. After reading your comments I'm going to wait for an Apple fix as well.

I have the same problem. And in the disk utility in the recovery mode, there is no "convert to apfs" option. That's strange. please fix this problem, Apple.

What I did, that worked, for my situation:

1. Did the FS conversion, in place, as noted in the link in Randy N.'s post above
2. Exited Disk utility
3. Clicked on Install MacOs, in Recovery Mode, and let it reinstall Mojave. The Mojave install left everything in place (user accounts, applications, etc.). All this did was reinstall the OS and install the boot files; and, set up the disk to boot.
4. Rebooted the system and everything was working fine.
5. Then performed the update to Catalina.

My OS is on an external, USB attached SSD disk. The internal disk was available to boot, in Recovery Mode, to, in order to use Disk Utility. Because it is very difficult to replace an iMac disk, I went with the USB SSD disk. It is much faster than the stock 5400 RPM SATA drive.

This upgrade was performed on an IMac 21.5" mid 2015 system which has a maximum of 8GB memory. The SSD drive was a way to deliver high speed, without having to buy a new iMac, or having to pay to get an SSD installed. It turns out, for the Catalina update, it was good I had the internal disk to do this.

I have Time Machine running, and it was up to date, so I could recover if the OS reinstall wiped everything out.

It took under an hour to reinstall Mojave and upgrade to Catalina.

Everything seemed to work, as expected. I did not have any 32 bit apps, except Acrobat Reader, which I removed before I did the Catalina upgrade.

I hope people find this useful. Also, this may not work for everyone.

In my eprsonal situation, I set up an external USB SSD drive, by following a procedure someone posted. It did not mention that you needed to first format the new drive as APFS. THe procedure I posted above will work, only if you have access to a second hard drive.

What I would suggest is get Carbon Copy and clone to an external drive that has been formatted as APFS. Then, upgrade the external drive to Catalina. Then, again use Carbon Copy to clone the external disk to the internal disk.

You want to make sure the external disk can boot, when you do the first clone. And, can be booted after you do the upgrade.

My external disk is a hhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078STRHBX/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1.

A SanDisk 1TB Extreme Portable External SSD - Up to 550MB/s - USB-C, USB 3.1 - SDSSDE60-1T00-G25. Certainly not an Apple SSD. It screams on a USB 3.0 port, as opposed to the standrd 5400 Apple provided 5400 RPM SATA disk.

This si now used as my system disk. The internal drive can be booted and used in the event of an emergency. Thsi morning I cloned my external drive to the inetrnal drive, so I did not have to do a second upgrade to Catalina.

nullibist wrote:

So i have an iMac with an internal 5400rpm IDE drive, formatted MacOS Journaled extended, which has Mojave 10.14 and i tried to install Catalina last night and got the message that the drive is not APFS so i can't install.

From what i've read, Mojave should already be APFS but there are some circumstances where you can end up with Mojave journaled extended instead. Is there a way to convert to APFS *without* wiping the drive, or do i have to do the Recovery Mode, use Disk Utility to erase and format the drive as APFS (is there a guarantee that APFS will not be greyed out in Disk Utility?), then choose the Install new MacOS. And at that point, which version of MacOS will it choose to install? Does it just download it from Apple and install it? I assume that it would get the latest version which would be Catalina.

It's all a bit confusing, so i'm going to hold off for a while until i get some answers.

Thanks.

Danny in Sydney.

Whatever you end up doing, make sure you have good verified working backups in case something goes wrong.

You could try booting into local Recovery Mode (Command + R) to try reinstalling macOS Mojave over top of itself to see if it will convert your drive to APFS. If it doesn't convert the drive, then you can try converting the drive to APFS using Disk Utility while booted into Internet Recovery Mode (Command + Option + R) or from a bootable macOS USB installer. If the Disk Utility GUI doesn't allow it, you can try using the command line version of "diskutil" to try converting the volume to APFS on the fly.

Worst case scenario you have to boot the Catalina installer (either from a bootable USB or from Internet Recovery Mode using Command + Option + R) to erase the physical drive and perform a clean install of Catalina.

bj3john4 wrote:

After several hours of Apple Support Chat two days ago, one of the support reps finally told me that the reason I couldn't reformat my drive (Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB) to APFS was because it wasn't a Macintosh drive.

All OEMs will blame third party hardware when things don't work correctly. I do know that some Samsung SSDs have had compatibility issues with Macs, but I don't know which ones. I wouldn't expect it to have a problem erasing the drive though, but APFS is a new file system so it is hard to say if Apple could be blocking some SSDs from using it.

AFAIK the only compatibility issue with third party SSDs is on systems using Apple's proprietary PCIe SSD connector. On these systems the macOS installer is unable to install the required system firmware if a non-Apple third party PCIe SSD is installed.

When I tried erasing the Samsung drive to reformat as APFS, there was no option to select APFS... and the reason I've been given is that it isn't a Macintosh drive.

Did you try erasing the whole physical drive? In order to see the physical drive in Disk Utility you need to click on "View" and select "Show all devices". You should then be able to select the physical drive in the left pane of Disk Utility to erase the drive as GUID partition and APFS (top option).

Maybe your system firmware was never fully updated so macOS is blocking you from using APFS.

Sometimes macOS has issues dealing with a drive if something unexpected occurs. When this happens I will erase the beginning part of the drive with zeroes to overwrite the partition table so the drive appears completely blank. If this doesn't work, then I will perform a hardware secure erase on the SSD which resets the SSD to factory defaults including erasing/blanking the SSD. To access the SSD's hardware secure erase feature requires using Linux. Parted Magic is a customized Linux boot disk with a customized app/script which makes it easy to perform the hardware secure erase.

Create a bootable Parted Magic USB drive using Etcher. Option Boot the Parted Magic drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". On the Parted Magic desktop there should be an icon for erasing drives. Within the app you need to select the "ATA Secure Erase" option. The "slow" erase option will not reset the SSD and will just cause undue wear and may make the problem worse. The "ATA Secure Erase" option will ask you to supply a password, so just type any simple word. The erase usually only takes 30seconds to several minutes to complete. You can get the last free version of Parted Magic from the MajorGeek's mirror link here.

It's worse than I thought. Not only can we not upgrade to Catalina, but Mojave stops updating without APFS. So now there is built in OS software that has stopped working for me (iMovie, e.g.). All, essentially at Apple's choosing. Why would it update iMovie to a version that is incompatible with the Operating System that performed the auto-update? Stuff like this is why I left Microsoft for Apple.

奕帆YiFan wrote:

I have the same problem. And in the disk utility in the recovery mode, there is no "convert to apfs" option. That's strange. please fix this problem, Apple.

Did you check each of the menu options in Disk Utility?

If the GUI of Disk Utility does not have the "convert" option, then you may be able to try it from the Terminal command line version of Disk Utility "diskutil".

I know the "convert" feature exists in Mojave and High Sierra, but it is possible it could have been removed from Catalina. If this is the case, then you can create a bootable Mojave USB installer and try using the installer's Disk Utility to convert the drive.

Just make sure to have good verified working backups of your system before you attempt any type of file system conversion or even macOS upgrade. There is always a chance you could lose easy access to your data during the process. You should always have good regular backups anyway.

It is strange. Mojave should be formatted as APFS.