Disk Utility won't upgrade SSD to APFS

Question

Level 1

8 points

Disk Utility won't upgrade SSD to APFS

Cloned El Capitan (10.11.6) to a 1TB SSD; it booted OK as external. Then upgraded the SSD to High Sierra (10.13.2) which continues to boot OK after installing SSD my iMac (12,1 - mid-2011).

Restarting in recovery mode takes me to Disk Utilities (v17.0) and sees the SSD as it should, but converting the boot partition to APFS is grayed-out in the tools menu.

Restarting in regular mode works OK, but the drive is still OS Extended (Journaled) format. What's up with that?

iMac, macOS High Sierra (10.13.2), Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB

Posted on Dec 13, 2017 11:02 AM

Reply

Answer 1

RAltizer Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 13, 2017 11:32 AM in response to MrHoffman

I'll give that a try, but the only macOS-bootable disk I have is my old El Capitan HDD. I expect its version of Disk Utility doesn't have APFS conversion, and copying the HS disk's version (v17.0) may not play nicely under El Capitan.

Reply

Answer 2

Dec 13, 2017 1:35 PM in response to RAltizer

RAltizer wrote:

I'll give that a try, but the only macOS-bootable disk I have is my old El Capitan HDD.

By following the link in the previous reply, a High Sierra download acquired from the Mac App Store can be made bootable on external storage, given a sufficiently-capacious USB storage device. I'd expect a USB storage device of 8 GB or larger will work.

Reply

Answer 3

Dec 13, 2017 11:11 AM in response to RAltizer

Try booting from an external storage device, and use that convert the internal disk from HFS+ to APFS. I don't expect that the currently-running boot disk can self-convert from HFS+ to APFS.

Reply