More boot camp problems new 5k imac 3 tera fusion drive

there seems to be problems with Yosemite and boot camp assistant

i'm cross posting this to the iMac forum but I spent hours online with apple tech today and none of the several foks I talked to there had even seen a 5k 27" yet and my call back from Cupertino and engineering is no till tomorrow so I thought I should post here too

MMy bto 5k shipped from China sunday night and arrived in Maine this morning.... Amazing when you think about it for a bto

iinstallation and set up we're going fine and I started up boot camp assistant to create a temp boot camp while I wait for my thunder bay 4 box to take the drives for my old Mac pro when boot camp will have a1 tera SSD all to itself....

so carved off a 700 gig boot camp partition which the assistant formatted fat I then plugged is the lighting to FW adapter in a LaCie 2 tera fw 800 drive to act as a bridge to my LaCie DVD burner which uses the old fw400 cables and inserted my new shrink wrap win 8.1 retail 64 DVD and up comes the win 8 install in very tiny type in a tiny window which got a bit of a laugh out of me.

And I go through it to the point of selecting that boot camp partition and then said it could not use a fat partition and I should reformat it from the win 8.1 installer which I did and then it said it could not use and unknown partition so I said great and booted back to 10-10 and the boot camp tool to put things back and it said it could not I then went to disk tools and it also said the 3tera fusion could not be either reformatted or put back to a single partition I was on with tech support where I went up through 4 levels of support due to the 5k bto which most had no knowledge of. We tried the optioncommand r to get to DT and the same problem as did going to reinstall from the net which after a 30 min down load could not reformat either it is now kicked to Cupertino with a call back tomorrow

( At this point all I want to do is put the computer back in the condition it was in when i started with a plain Yosemite on an unpartitioned 3 tera fusion... Then deal with boot camp when it can have its own drive)

am betting it will take a Unix comand line to reformat but be aware there may be boot camp issues with my configuration

and any help here will be great fully received

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 21, 2014 4:04 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:04 PM in response to Windshadow99

There is a much easier and cleaner method on the new iMac 5K, because it is a full UEFI machine and Windows 8.1 is UEFI compliant. The traditional bootcamp Hybrid MBR is a travesty on such a beautiful machine.

Please see this thread - Re: Problem installing Windows (7, 8.0, 8.1) on BOOTCAMP - Mavericks.

Initializing the internal disk may not be necessary at all but Command+Opt+R and DU is needed, if you really need to initialize the internal Fusion HD.

This thread can help you initialize the internal drive - Re: Can't format former Boot Camp partition

Reply

Answer 2

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:12 PM in response to Loner T

THanks I will use that info to set up windows 8.1 64 on its own 1 tera SSD once I get the thunder bay 4 box it is a most enlightening artical is was unaware od the UEFI aspect.....

right now now I just want to reformat the 3 tera fusion so it is once again able to be partitioned normaly with disk tools... I have a plea up on the Unix forum here asking if there is a comand line way to do it I just set up an external 2 tera drive with a 512 gig fresh partition where I installed a fresh install of Yosemite so I can boot into it and I hope reformat the internal.... No luck using disk tools though so my hopes are on a command line reformat.

thanks again for the pointer to the right way to do it

Reply

Answer 3

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 21, 2014 6:22 PM in response to Windshadow99

The second article has the steps to reformat because Disk Utility on Yosemite has challenges.

You need to use diskutil cs commands. If OS X is working, please post the output of

diskutil list

diskutil cs list

I can give you the syntax and commands to clean up the disk. Command+Opt+R is needed so the internal disk is not in use when erased.

Reply

Answer 4

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 21, 2014 7:04 PM in response to Loner T

diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage 121.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *3.0 TB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage 2.3 TB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s3

4: Apple_CoreStorage 708.1 GB disk1s4

5: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk1s5

/dev/disk2

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *2.4 TB disk2

Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2

B413D0D6-817A-438A-B60A-CAE9B7AC4703

Unencrypted Fusion Drive

/dev/disk3

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: FDisk_partition_scheme *15.6 GB disk3

1: DOS_FAT_32 ABOOTCAMP 15.6 GB disk3s1

/dev/disk4

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: IR3_CCSA_X64FRE_EN-... *4.1 GB disk4

/dev/disk5

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *2.0 TB disk5

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk5s1

2: Microsoft Basic Data Union 500.1 GB disk5s2

3: Apple_HFS Shimmo 499.6 GB disk5s3

4: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk5s4

5: Apple_HFS Orange 500.1 GB disk5s5

6: Apple_HFS Newcastle 499.4 GB disk5s6

Ls-iMac:~

and

diskutil cs list

CoreStorage logical volume groups (2 found)

|

+-- Logical Volume Group 1869B0B4-B850-413D-8726-41934602250B

| =========================================================

| Name: Macintosh HD

| Status: Online

| Size: 2412498640896 B (2.4 TB)

| Free Space: 0 B (0 B)

| |

| +-< Physical Volume 7F622DCA-6D45-4940-BE17-893BB57CF948

| | ----------------------------------------------------

| | Index: 0

| | Disk: disk0s2

| | Status: Online

| | Size: 120988852224 B (121.0 GB)

| |

| +-< Physical Volume 50B22A72-6463-4CEA-9189-C708884DF658

| | ----------------------------------------------------

| | Index: 1

| | Disk: disk1s2

| | Status: Online

| | Size: 2291509788672 B (2.3 TB)

| |

| +-> Logical Volume Family 9064DC1E-5E23-4887-9B99-46507C4A15AF

| ----------------------------------------------------------

| Encryption Status: Unlocked

| Encryption Type: None

| Conversion Status: NoConversion

| Conversion Direction: -none-

| Has Encrypted Extents: No

| Fully Secure: No

| Passphrase Required: No

| |

| +-> Logical Volume B413D0D6-817A-438A-B60A-CAE9B7AC4703

| ---------------------------------------------------

| Disk: disk2

| Status: Online

| Size (Total): 2407000178688 B (2.4 TB)

| Conversion Progress: -none-

| Revertible: No

| LV Name: Macintosh HD

| Volume Name: Macintosh HD

| Content Hint: Apple_HFS

|

+-- Logical Volume Group 510FD803-3431-4C23-9BAA-1D1CA0C0B065

=========================================================

Name: Winboot

Status: Online

Size: 708089155584 B (708.1 GB)

Free Space: 707736829952 B (707.7 GB)

|

+-< Physical Volume 033CEB50-621B-474F-9AB0-D4FC410A9718

----------------------------------------------------

Index: 0

Disk: disk1s4

Status: Online

Size: 708089155584 B (708.1 GB)

Ls-iMac:~

Reply

Answer 5

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:15 PM in response to Windshadow99

1. The first Fusion drive consists of disk0s2 + disk1s2. This has OS X.

2. The LVG 510FD803-3431-4C23-9BAA-1D1CA0C0B065 cannot be used for Windows8.1 (W8.1 has no concept of a Fusion drive) .

3. You can leave the 2TB /dev/disk5 as a regular disk. It does not need to be a part of a Fusion setup, even though it can be.

4. You have four possible choices,

a. W8.1+EFI on 2TB disk using GPT.

b. Carve out a GPT partition out of the 3TB disk, and recreate a Fusion HD of the remainder for OS X.

c. Bootcamp using a Hybrid MBR after carving a FAT32/NTFS within the 2TB limit on the Fusion drive and rebuilding it. This is the most fragile setup I can imagine. I do not recommend it.

d. Carve out a GPT partition out of the SSD and rebuild Fusion drive with remainder, but Windows will be limited by the size of SSD.

I am not aware of Apple porting W8.1 to support CoreStorage volumes. 😉

If you need to start from scratch, the SSD+HDD (120GB+3TB) needs to be erased and rebuilt using one of the four choices.

Reply

Answer 6

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:28 PM in response to Loner T

I Am very greatful for all of your help but I do have some questions first.

My plan was to wait on the windows stuff till my thunder bay 4 thunderbolt external drive box comes tomorrow or the next day then take the 4 drive sleds out of my old Mac Pro and put them in the thunderbolt box giving the 1 tera SSD over entirely to windows 8 and letting the three hard drives be set up as raid 5 for data I expect I will need some handholding to do it in the no boot camp way you recommend but let's have that as a separate problem after I restore this 5k to the way it was when I opened the box this morning..... By the way have I mentioned how amazing this 5 k screen is

what I would like to do (when I wake up tomorrow I have been at this for about 14 hours and need sleep) is to put the Three tera fusion internal back to one OS X partition the way it was when I started and I would hope to have the partitioning available on it again for posable future use

thanks again for all the great focused help

windy

Reply

Answer 7

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:41 PM in response to Windshadow99

W8.1 cannot be installed on "external" drives. Windows-to-go can be.If you install it on the "internal" 1TB SSD on the old MP, you will physically need to remove all other drives from the old MP. Such an installation of Windows will not work on the new 5K, because of licensing issues with W8, and the licensing is tied to the hardware when it was installed. You can use a product called Winclone to move it from one Mac to another, but it does require re-activation.

It is better to install W8.1 on the iMac5K directly and activating it, then moving it after activation.

Bootcamp has built-in checks to not even partition an "external" drive to enforce M$ restrictions.

G'night.

Reply

Answer 8

y2kpc

Level 1

4 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:48 PM in response to Windshadow99

Windshadow,

I'm not sure if this will help you or not, but my retina imac arrived today as well (fusion 1tb). I ran the Bootcamp assistant which first wanted to create a puny 10GB partition for Windows, so I clicked the split in half option to make them each ~500GB. When it launched Windows 8.1 setup (which was in full screen, nothing was tiny or compressed on my display), Windows showed 4 partitions. The fourth was labeled bootcamp but it was "unable to install Windows on this partition". The research I did helped me conclude that all I had to do was click on format, and voila. It finished setup fine, auto launched Bootcamp driver install/updates, and I was in Windows in less than an hour.

This is my first imac (bought it just for the screen). Since the fusion controller is built into the hardware (motherboard), and since both Windows and OSX are using 50% of the 1TB capacity, I assume both OS's will benefit equally by the fusion technology. If my logic is wrong here, please let me know.

I also posted in this thread: . Re: Re: Boot Camp on iMac Retina 5K?

I'm surprised that Windows maxes out at 3840x2160 (4K) resolution, and OSX maxes out at even less: 3200x1800. 😟

Reply

Answer 9

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 21, 2014 8:58 PM in response to y2kpc

y2kpc wrote:

This is my first imac (bought it just for the screen). Since the fusion controller is built into the hardware (motherboard), and since both Windows and OSX are using 50% of the 1TB capacity, I assume both OS's will benefit equally by the fusion technology. If my logic is wrong here, please let me know.

This can be verified by the two terminal commands I mentioned on the other thread. the "Fusion" drive is actually a 120GB SSD and an HDD part (you can see it here has well - see disk0 and disk1). If you ordered a 1TB SSD (PCIe Flash) then it has no mechanical HDD part and is technically not a "Fusion" drive, but can be a CoreStorage volume. "Fusion" is SSD+HDD, while CoreStorage can be a combination of any number of drives, and it is a Logical Volume manager. It behaves a bit better than others when it detects an SSD as the first device by managing IO better. I am not aware of "Fusion" controller hardware.

Reply

Answer 10

y2kpc

Level 1

4 points

Oct 21, 2014 9:44 PM in response to Loner T

Loner T,

Here is the output. From this I have concluded that when I told boot camp to split the storage in half, it gave each OS 557.8GB.

OS X got the entire 128gb SSD plus 441gb of the 1TB spinning disk

BOOTCAMP (win8.1) got 557.8gb contained entirely on the 1TB spinning disk

Clearly this means my Windows 8.1 install is not going to benefit at all from the Fusion drive. As you said, it appears to be a software feature in OSX. I'm already beginning to wonder how much more I could have manually assigned to the bootcamp partition. If I would have assigned all but 121GB, I think the Bootcamp utility would have given the entire spinning disk to Windows (sans the recovery HD partition of 650MB). That may pave the road for installing a larger SSD down the road and use it the 2.5" SSD ONLY for Windows, while using the Apple 128gb proprietary pci-e SSD to retain a dual boot option into OSX.

diskutil list

/dev/disk0

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *121.3 GB disk0

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage 121.0 GB disk0s2

3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk0s3

/dev/disk1

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1

1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1

2: Apple_CoreStorage 441.5 GB disk1s2

3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s3

4: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 557.8 GB disk1s4

/dev/disk2

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *557.0 GB disk2

Logical Volume on disk0s2, disk1s2

DCA5BF67-C050-4CB1-A390-D94F6115D85E

Unencrypted Fusion Drive

Owners-iMac:~ Owner$ diskutil cs list

CoreStorage logical volume groups (1 found)

|

+-- Logical Volume Group 31430FA9-6836-4252-BEC5-9734BBAF91B3

=========================================================

Name: Macintosh HD

Status: Online

Size: 562498494464 B (562.5 GB)

Free Space: 0 B (0 B)

|

+-< Physical Volume D758D7CE-468D-42E3-A263-8A67A18DC2B2

| ----------------------------------------------------

| Index: 0

| Disk: disk0s2

| Status: Online

| Size: 120988852224 B (121.0 GB)

|

+-< Physical Volume D93D673D-A5D5-4601-BAE6-B7095408B5D2

| ----------------------------------------------------

| Index: 1

| Disk: disk1s2

| Status: Online

| Size: 441509642240 B (441.5 GB)

|

+-> Logical Volume Family EFE1AB27-4F2F-4F0A-9422-4A0680C44D19

----------------------------------------------------------

Encryption Status: Unlocked

Encryption Type: None

Conversion Status: NoConversion

Conversion Direction: -none-

Has Encrypted Extents: No

Fully Secure: No

Passphrase Required: No

|

+-> Logical Volume DCA5BF67-C050-4CB1-A390-D94F6115D85E

---------------------------------------------------

Disk: disk2

Status: Online

Size (Total): 557000032256 B (557.0 GB)

Conversion Progress: -none-

Revertible: No

LV Name: Macintosh HD

Volume Name: Macintosh HD

Content Hint: Apple_HFS

Reply

Answer 11

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 22, 2014 5:48 AM in response to Loner T

thanks once more loner after some sleep i think i finally understand i have to install 8.1 on the fusion first and the later i can drive it a drive of it own from the box once installed?

if that is the case then i need to put things back the way they were and then carve out the 700 gig chunk again and then option boot to the boot image efi item and hope that this tim the install converts the fat partition to what it wants... am i on the right track?

if so we are aiming to do

b. Carve out a GPT partition out of the 3TB disk, and recreate a Fusion HD of the remainder for OS X.

right?

one thing i do not understandthat dead win boot partition did not seem to show in the CL data from terminal i provided so how do we work on it it is the same as abovewhen i did it shift option command R

Reply

Answer 12

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 22, 2014 6:10 AM in response to Windshadow99

You normally not see Recovery HD, Boot OS X, EFI in DU, but there is a "debug" menu, which makes things visible (Please see http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Enable-Disk-Utilitys-Debug-Menu.htm)

The difference between Option b and d is that you have the Windows OS on the SSD vs HDD. Given that you do have 3TB HDD, it can be carved out to have an NTFS partition for Windows data and the pure OS on SSD, which will give you better boot speeds for Windows ('SSD") and OS X ("Fusion"), both. the non-OS data can reside on the 3TB HDD for both OSes. OS X does it automatically, but Windows has been too to use the "D" drive for data on the HDD.

It would be your decision in which direction is pursued.

The Winboot does show up in DU and the CL data. From your diskutil cs list output...

diskutil cs list

CoreStorage logical volume groups (2 found)

...

+-> Logical Volume B413D0D6-817A-438A-B60A-CAE9B7AC4703

| ---------------------------------------------------

| Disk: disk2

| Status: Online

| Size (Total): 2407000178688 B (2.4 TB)

| Conversion Progress: -none-

| Revertible: No

| LV Name: Macintosh HD

| Volume Name: Macintosh HD

| Content Hint: Apple_HFS

+-- Logical Volume Group 510FD803-3431-4C23-9BAA-1D1CA0C0B065

=========================================================

Name: Winboot

Status: Online

Size: 708089155584 B (708.1 GB)

Free Space: 707736829952 B (707.7 GB)

|

+-< Physical Volume 033CEB50-621B-474F-9AB0-D4FC410A9718

----------------------------------------------------

Index: 0

Disk: disk1s4

Status: Online

Size: 708089155584 B (708.1 GB)

Reply

Answer 13

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 22, 2014 6:19 AM in response to Loner T

ok then since my main use of this computer is my photography biz and the windows 8 will be almost entirely for gaming option B would seem to make sense

later i guess i can move everything on win boot to my external 1 tera ssd and give the space on the internal back to the OS X is that right?

so how do we proceed?

Reply

Answer 14

Loner T

Level 9

59,513 points

Oct 22, 2014 6:40 AM in response to Windshadow99

I will use the data from the output that you have posted earlier. Here are the steps.

1. Reboot the Mac using Command+Opt+R (Internet Recovery) and should start with a spinning globe.

2. Start an OSX Terminal session in Recovery mode. Please stop and post back here if you see any error messages.

3. Delete Macintosh HD - diskutil cs deleteVolume B413D0D6-817A-438A-B60A-CAE9B7AC4703

4. Delete Macintosh HD Group - diskutil cs delete 1869B0B4-B850-413D-8726-41934602250B

5. Delete Winboot Group - diskutil cs delete 1869B0B4-B850-413D-8726-41934602250B

6. Run diskutili list and you should see your Lacie, one 120GB SSD and a 3TB HDD.

7. Post back here. This is just cleanup. Once it completes, rebuild can be started, you need to stay in Recovery in the OS X terminal.

Reply

Answer 15

Windshadow99 Author

Level 1

34 points

Oct 22, 2014 7:29 AM in response to Loner T

AAll went well until step 5 where it reports does not appear to be a valid core storage logical volume group UUID or name

i entered it with care and checked each character etc and did it three times with the same results

have not gone on to check diskutil

Reply