Ravenmoon wrote:
Aside from Disk Utility and BootCamp, I don't have or use other disk or partition management software; that's one thing that makes this so odd! LOL Also, by physical disks you mean both portions of the Fusion drive, yes? Other than that, I only have the one drive giving me problems; my externals are fine.
Yes, I meant the SSD and HDD parts.
I have tried booting in SafeMode (with no other drives present [i.e. physically disconnected]), and nothing changes; the same partitions appear in DiskUtility (as below). The only difference is that the BootCamp partition does not mount. I am still unable to set my StartUp Drive to MacOS X in System Prefs; doing so returns the same error: "Building boot caches on boot helper partition failed."
What does sudo bless --info return? Bootcamp is not expected to work in Safe Mode. What files do you have in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration folder. Here is my example.
ls -l /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/
total 768
drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 Sep 12 2013 CaptiveNetworkSupport
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 7309 Jan 29 06:34 NetworkInterfaces.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 232 Sep 12 2013 com.apple.Boot.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 181 Jul 8 2014 com.apple.IPConfiguration.control.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 2351 Mar 1 2014 com.apple.PowerManagement.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 321 Feb 1 2014 com.apple.accounts.exists.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3368 Feb 6 09:26 com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 231 Jul 8 2014 com.apple.eapolclient.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 348 Feb 6 09:26 com.apple.smb.server.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 331785 Feb 6 09:26 com.apple.wifi.message-tracer.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 17167 Jan 14 15:03 preferences.plist
If you have Xcode installed, you can open the .plist files. com.apple.Boot.plist is what can provide some interesting information.
Deleting this folder and rebooting rebuilds it, but it strongly recommended that this folder be backed up elsewhere. Customized settings can be lost otherwise.
Disk Utility Verify returns "Disk appears to be OK" on all partitions except the "Boot OS X," which it is unable to verify (the option is greyed out). My issue is not with Windows recognizing the Mac Drive; my Mac OS X partition appears in Windows just fine. My issue is the 'extra' partitions that I can't get rid of, the fact that I cannot remove all the partitions and repartition the drive, and that I can't set my startup drive to the Mac OS X partition. All of these seem to point to some kind of problem with the hidden boot partitions.
One suggestion would be to install OSX on an external volume - OS X: Installing OS X on an external volume - Apple Support
and testing a clean install of OSX. If you can reboot the Mac and then go to Applications -> Utilities -> Console logs and in the top right search box, type EFI and search, it may provide clues on what is mounting these hidden partitions. After the Debug menu was enabled, were these ever mounted by hand at least once?
- Which of the hidden partitions I am seeing SHOULD be there for a drive with one Mac partition and one BootCamp partition, and which ones are extraneous?
- How can I address the 'boot caches' issue so I can designate the Mac OS partition as the startup drive?
- How can I safely remove those that are extraneous, and restore the correct structure?
(Is it possible that the Boot Camp utility could have created a Mavericks/Yosemite hybrid of some kind? I keep seeing these Core Storage issues coming up with Yosemite, but I haven't used Yosemite.... Though I used the utility in the Applications folder.....)
Your diskutil list output shows the correct ones. EFI and Recovery HD (and Apple Boot) should not be mounted by default. You should only see the LVG (Macintosh HD) and the LV (Macintosh HD - they have the same name which is another source of confusion). Bootcamp should also be visible. There should be nothing else mounted. The external disk boot may help diagnose/fix the boot caches issue. The structure is correct, but the visibility could be better. Pick one EFI volume in DU, and test if you can unmount it.
Be aware that File Vault2 and Fusion Drive both use CoreStorage, even before the advent of Yosemite (since ML 10.8.x). Try the external boot first, otherwise can you set up a Time Machine backup and backup OSX. For Bootcamp, you can use Winclone (Windows backup/restore is problematic on Macs).