Formatting an SSD for apfs

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Level 1

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Formatting an SSD for apfs

I bought a Fanxiang S101 to clone a drive for my iMac and when I erase the drive to apfs it fails, it will format to fat32 or Mac os extended however. Is the drive defective?

iMac (2017 – 2020)

Posted on Jul 4, 2023 10:10 AM

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Answer 1

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walt611 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 5, 2023 6:23 AM in response to walt611

All my fault! I use a NexStar to plug in the ssd and it was the cause of the problem. I used a second one and it worked fine! Thanks for all the replies!

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

124,336 points

Jul 4, 2023 12:03 PM in response to walt611

To get to the partition map settings, you must "Show All Devices" from the View popup menu. You can then erase the entire device, set the partition map, and format as APFS.

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Answer 3

Jul 4, 2023 10:53 AM in response to walt611

When you format, make sure that you are also choosing the correct partition map, which in the case of APFS needs to be GUID (and not MBR as in the windows side formats).

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Answer 4

ku4hx

Level 7

23,786 points

Jul 5, 2023 6:04 AM in response to walt611

Can you format it on a different computer? Even a windows box if you have one available. That might help determine if the drive is defective.

We have several SSDs and all of them formatted easily the first time.

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Answer 5

walt611 Author

Level 1

4 points

Jul 4, 2023 5:04 PM in response to Barney-15E

I tried that on two different Macs one Running Catalina and one running Monterey and the erasure looks like it’s working and just as it finishes the red stop sign with the exclamation point pops up with operation failed!

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