PaulB190
Level 1 (5 points)
Mac OS X

Q: Will APFS cause dual boot problems?

Is Mac OS's new file system, APFS, going to break my dual boot set up with Windows 7 by causing the disk to be unreadable by Windows when booting into it?  [or any other reason I couldn't guess at]

 

If so is there a driver that has been released, or will be released, to correct that problem?

 

I have mission critical legacy accounting software that there is no OS X or Mac OS equivalent for, which is the only reason I bother dual booting in the first place.  If there is no way to boot into Windows to run this software after an update into Sierra I guess I won't be updating, which would be a shame.

 

Thanks to any knowledgable person who gets back to me on this.

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), null

Posted on Oct 22, 2016 4:55 PM

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PaulB190

Q: Will APFS cause dual boot problems?

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  • by PaulB190,

    PaulB190 PaulB190 Oct 22, 2016 7:23 PM in response to Lanny
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 22, 2016 7:23 PM in response to Lanny

    My existing issue was whether or not the formatting was changing with this release.  Which you just answered.

     

    So I guess that means that one could make an APFS partition to store and read, but it is nothing the upgrade does on its own.  It will not overwrite HFS+ on any partition during the install.  Great!  Thanks.

  • by John Galt,

    John Galt John Galt Oct 22, 2016 9:00 PM in response to PaulB190
    Level 9 (50,524 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 22, 2016 9:00 PM in response to PaulB190

    PaulB190 wrote:

     

    So I guess that means that one could make an APFS partition to store and read, but it is nothing the upgrade does on its own.  It will not overwrite HFS+ on any partition during the install.

     

    That is correct. You're not guessing.


    Sometime next year Apple will introduce AFPS for a bootable system. No one yet knows what that will be. It can be presumed AFPS will also support Time Machine, but again no one knows just how that will be implemented.

  • by John Galt,

    John Galt John Galt Oct 22, 2016 9:06 PM in response to PaulB190
    Level 9 (50,524 points)
    Mac OS X
    Oct 22, 2016 9:06 PM in response to PaulB190

    Though it is mentioned in the same tech sources that an update to APFS will render a Time Machine back up useless [though I don't know why that should be the case, as the data doesn't carry the file system formatting with it when copied from disk to disk].

     

    For what it's worth, I agree with your reasoning.

     

    So if I am to take the info I've read literally it means a backup could be useless when moving from HFS+ to APFS.

     

    I assume there will be a way to convert HFS+ formatted Time Machine backup volumes, but I have no idea how that will work. Will it require an amount of free space as the existing backups? Will it delete a sufficient number of older backups to create that free space? Will you need to essentially migrate the HFS+ backup volume to a separate, AFPS formatted one to preserve that backup history? Anything is possible.

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