Boot Camp failed on 3TB Fusion - 1TB gone missing

I finally had the guts to try installing Win 8 via Bootcamp on my 27" iMac with 3tb Fusion Drive, and this time it worked. There were a few near-gotchas along the way:

• The 'Partitioning Disk' phase of bootcamp setup took well over an hour, with the bulk of this being spent with apparently no motion of the progress bar ... but this time I was patient, and it worked.
• Follwing that when my iMac rebooted into what should have been the windows partion for the install, It booted into a black screen and a message saying there was no boot volume. I fixed this my rebooting while holding the option key down, and selecting the Windows volume, whch was the USB install stick I prepared. Bootup and installation proceeded. The other thing I did was to ensure I didn't have any 'non-standard' thing sconencted to my USB or Thunderbolt ports during install .. just the USB Installer stick, a USB Keyboard & mouse, as I've had issues with installation hanging in the past.
• lastly, when porompted to select a destination volume during Windows insallation, I could see the BOOTCAMP volume that I created, but when I selected this I got an error saying I couldn't install Windows there. This was easily fixed by selecting that volume and first clicking the refortmat button at the bottom of the window to make it NTFS before choosing it for installation. The reformat is near instantanous, and the volume can then be selected for Windows installation, and installation finishes without a hitch.

I'm happy to now have a single 2.68 TB Fusion partition for OS X and 320GB partition for Win 8.

I'm about 18 hours into this madness...so frustrating. I have EandI three times, manually partitioned, converted partitions to ntfs and mbr/gpt back and forth, prayed to every god out there...ect.

The one thing I didn't do was wait well over an hour for the partition to complete in BOOTCAMP. I'm going to try patience and hope for the best. I'm just hoping I don't end up with the "cannot install windows to this partition" "cannot create new partition" errors...those have been incredibly frustrating to see after trying a fix I think might work.

As for those of you losing your space because of quitting BOOTCAMP during the partition process, boot from your windows installer and when it asks you to choose the install partition just delete the "core storage partitions" from there if you can recognize and know which ones they are (be very careful). Windows doesn't know any better so it will delete them cleanly.

These are hidden in OSX, which is why the space seems to disappear, but you don't need to EandI to fix it. If you want to see them in disk utility, google "enable disk utility debug menu" and then choose "show all partitions" from the menu, then use windows bootable installer to delete them.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Ps. Thanks for the great idea of moving iMac into living room...I'm about to have a James Bond marathon ;)

I have had exactly the same problem with my similarly configured iMac. Having been through every possible solution, including an hour on the phone to Apple Care, I took it into my local Apple Store today to be told the hard drive had to be replaced as the 802gb partition was unrecoverable! Needless to say I'm not impressed with this happening to my less than 6 weeks old and very expensive computer!

I too am having the exact same problems as everyone here. I have a 27" iMac with 3TB fusion drive. Here are the issues that I had:

Problem 1: Downloading the Bootcamp updates, the progress bar would freeze about 1/2 way then I would get an answer that the updates couldn't be downloaded due to a network problem. I cancelled, then tried it again with the same result. I then found the link to the download directly and saved it to my hard drive.

Question: Do I have to partition my external USB drive and format that partion for Windows FAT then put the downloaded updates on that partition?

Problem 2: I used Bootcamp to partition a 200GB (actually 205 becuase the stupid slider is so sensitive and it won't allow you to just type in the size you want). And off it ran. It took forever, so I went and watched TV. I then heard my computer restart. When I came back it was a black screen. I forced it to reboot with the power button. This brought up another black screen that stated the no boot volume, press a key statement. I again forced a reboot and held down option key which allowed me to choose my iMac hard drive. There was no option to choose a windows/bootcamp drive.

A bootcamp icon was on my desktop now. I opened disc utility and selected my Macintosh HD. Boot camp had then partitioned my drive into 3 partitions. The Top partion was labeled Macintosh HD, then a Bootcamp partion of 205GB then a third partion at the bottom also labeled Macintosh HD. The two partions labeled Macintosh HD were greyed out and no options were selectable. I selected the bootcamp partion and deleted it. Now I have two Macintosh HD partions showing, but they are not present in the left column of the drive maps.

Question: How do I get my hard drive back to one partion? How do I finally get Windows 8 installed? This is my second iMac I've tried to do this with. They made me return the last one because when I deleted the Bootcamp partition it formatted it as "Free space" and we couldn't format the drive & start over.

I spent over 2 hours on the phone with Apple Support. They could not figure out why I have multiple partitions. They had me try to modify it in disc utility, we tried to modify it in safe mode through disk utility then through some sort of internet mode... no dice. It still shows two partitions both names Macintosh HD.

They had me reload Mac OSX twice and scheduled me for another call this evening. I'm really starting to hate these fusion drives!!!!

Apple Tier two advisors don't know, unfortunately. Mine thought my hard drive was failing bahahha Most of them have never seen it before. Solution:

***BACK UP***

Boot from windows 8 disk/bootable USB

Run installer

When you get to partition selection, grab unnecessary partition and delete it from the menu.

Windows knows no better. Mac absolutely will not delete a Macintosh HD partition.

Repartition/reinstall Mac OS.

Most important part: WINDOWS WILL NOT INSTALL IF ANY USB DEVICES ARE PLUGGED IN, other than bootable wibdows USB and wired keyboard.

Enjoy.

I'm bummed to have to tell you that your hard drive was most likely perfectly fine. Ive been dealing with bootcamp for years, and fought HOURS with this snafu. Its software. Your drives are not bad people, MAC just gets extremely confused and won't delete it's own journaled partitions, as weird as that sounds. You have to delete those ghost/free space partitions from the windows bootable. I stumbled onto this out of frustration, and it totally worked. It was pretty funny, actually...the madness behind it. Don't forget that other USB devices are not your friend when installing. Hard lesson I learned.

How do I boot from a windows 8 disc? I have a superdrive that's connected via USB. Everyone is saying to not connect anything USB. With the amount of people with this issue I'm shocked that Apple doesn't have it figured out yet.

bured in the forum are how to and apple does support usb dvd but limits it to the id of those mac models and not everyone... think different can be taken many ways it seems... so involved editing a plist I believe to add your mac machine ID to it.

may have changed with BC v 5.0 , or not.

You can have an apple wired keyboard/mouse plugged in and your SuperDrive. Just to be as clean as possible I'd plug them into the first two ports. On boot up hold option key. That'll bring up your boot options.

I'd recommend just making a USB bootable if SuperDrive is being rejected.

I'm ready to burn this iMac. This is the second iMac I've gone through this problem on.

I booted from the DVD drive by restarting the computer and holding down the C key. I then started the windows 8 installer. I then located this "ghost" partion and deleted the partion. It then labels this partion as unallocated space as seen in the picture below.

Note when I select the drive labeled Drive 0 Unallocated space... all options are greyed out!

When I close the installer and get back into Mac OSX, it shows that partition still exists, but it is now of the type "Free Space". All options are greyed out in disc utility and now my Hard drive shows that only 2.2 TB are available out of 3TB. So I've basically lost 1TB of storage space that is not formatable. Please help!