TarDisk and Mojave

So I did a clean install on just the Apple Hard Drive. I wiped the Tardisk so it's just an SD card now. Even if you get the Tardisk to pear you still need to do a complete erase of the Tardisk per the instructions they sent me. That being said the instructions they gave me didn't work. So now my Tardisk is an embedded second hard drive on my MacBook. I moved my home folder, my iTunes and photos to my Tardisk SD card. I set the Tardisk to login in under my user preferences so it automatically connects if I restart my computer. Here are a few links to articles to help move your folders to the Tardisk hard drive if you go that route. I personally don't want to go into my terminal to run commands to try to pear it which is what you have to do now. Because I leave the Tardisk installed all the time I'm ok doing this. Once you have those folders moved you don't need to worry about it again.

How to transfer your iPhone or Mac Photo library to an external drive

https://www.lifewire.com/move-macs-home-folder-new-location-2260157

This seems to be up to date -- it's for people who need Sierra but cannot do Mojave:

How to upgrade to macOS Sierra - Apple Support

But it specifically states that you must already be using High Sierra or earlier -- the install software won't download if you're already running Mojave. If this document is linking to the same Sierra installer that the TarDisk Pearing document links to, this would explain why the link didn't work for you.

So right now it doesn't appear that you cannot even obtain the Sierra installer if you're already running Mojave. Which is exactly what they're asking us to do. Argh.

We do need either another source for the Sierra installer, or we need to find a way to downgrade to High Sierra, and run the Sierra software from there.

TarDisk does support High Sierra. I'm literally typing this to you on a Mac running High Sierra with a TarDisk installed. Been doing it for over a year now with very few difficulties.

The problem with upgrading isn't the MacOS version per se — it's the filesystem. APFS is mandated for solid state drives under High Sierra, and for all drives under Mojave. But TarDisk will only run to begin with on the older filesystem, HFS+.

This would not appear to be the problem with SRB NY's particular concern, since their computer is already running High Sierra, albeit with some difficulties. This means that HFS+ is the filesystem they are running under.

Whatever the issue is there, it's nothing to do with compatibility. That being said, no idea. Sounds like a "start over and try it again" type of scenario to me.

As well, while I'm glad that the "turning it into an SD card" solution is working for you, joneser13, others here have successfully upgraded to Mojave without having to resort to that, using the instructions posted here. We've spent a lot of time and effort here working out what the problem is and how to fix it. It's just a matter of choice as to whether you want to jump through all the many hoops to make it happen.

That and whether you're willing to permanently downgrade your entire filesystem just to allow TarDisk to work. 🙄

This is exactly what happened to me a week ago. I ejected the TarDisk, formatted my MacBook and made a clean install of Mojave. Hope you have a fresh backup of your computer.

I think that $350 gone to trash...

So it seems as Tardisk has different instructions to pear on High Sierra and Mojave. They wanted me to go into the terminal and type a bunch of commands to configure it now. That being said the instructions they sent didn't even work. So now i'm using the tardisk as an very expensive and overpriced SD card. i'm in the process of moving over programs and files I don't use all the time to help save space. I've called over 10 times and sent numerous emails and have gotten only that one email response.

Okay, there is a way to install High Sierra. Once you wipe the drive to install Mojave, you would have to wipe your drive a second time and do a clean install of High Sierra from there, since High Sierra can't be installed on top of Mojave:

How to upgrade to macOS High Sierra - Apple Support..

Presumably once High Sierra is up and running and everything's been restored from backup, we can then use the High Sierra Pearing Guide above to download the Sierra installer and follow the rest of the instructions to pear the TarDisk. I'm guessing that once the TarDisk is peared under APFS in High Sierra, the Mojave upgrade should work normally. But I don't know for sure.

I've reached out to customer service, let them know about the issue with the link and have asked how to proceed. I'll post an update here as soon as I hear back.

Might be a couple of days.

For anyone still stuck in the install loop, hold down Command + R as you boot up, letting go of it when you see the Apple logo. This will take you to a menu that will allow you to restore your most recent backup under High Sierra. From there you can presumably use the instructions posted on the last page to covert to APFS using the Sierra installer, and then upgrade to Mojave after.

Haven't tried yet myself.

I have experienced a load of problems with High Sierra so I cannot wait to upgrade to Mojave in the hope of some improvements. It never occurred to me that the problems may have been because of Tardisk (my problems include "sleep wake failure", unable to close the lid without crashing etc).

Anyway I figure the best way for me - having experienced the same endless loop of trying and failing to install Mojave over High Sierra - is to back up all my docs, photos and music onto an external drive, unpear the TD and wipe the computer. Then I will install a fresh Mojave from a USB onto a now half-sized HD and use the external drive for my documents and music etc until Tardisk come up with a solution. When they do I will put the TD back into the computer. If I can temporarily use the TD as a storage disk I will do that instead of using the external drive.

I am only doing this because my machine is now extremely slow and I really need to wipe it to clear any issues. Otherwise I would just wait until Tardisk come up with a proper upgrade solution.

We already have, Rebccaway. See the last few pages of responses. Bottom line is that there is an official solution and you can find it here, but that many of us are hesitant to use it because it involves a ton of painstaking work and ends up permanently downgrading your filesystem from the one that Mojave was built to run on.

Also, none of us are terribly pleased with TarDisk at the moment.

Thanks for the replies in this thread. I found a TarDisk I was sent to review (after expressing some skepticism about it) in a pile of stuff. I put off installing it last-year because I was unsure how it would play with High Sierra and APFS. Now that it is clear that Pear hasn’t been updated in the best way and that using it on Mojave will require a lot of manual work and going back to HFS+, I’m glad I never bothered.

I may use it on a machine I don’t intend to upgrade to Mojave, but even then, the state of support seems to indicate this product is all but dead.

Thanks for putting information here as it wasn’t on any of the official channels for TarDisk.

So I finally get bored and I managed to install Mojave yesterday on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro

It was a little bit too simple so I'm still expecting something bad to happen or something obvious I missed.

Previously I had High Sierra installed on the Mac

Here is what I did:

- Deactivate filevault

- Timemachine backup in case

- Backup all my files manually (including the 60G of my outlook profile and my iMovie library) by copy/paste to external drive

- Restart, go to recovery mode by pressing Command + R

- Launch disk utility - Show all hardware - On the left it showed a Fusion Drive

- Erase the disk and format it using AFPS (How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support)

- Quit disk utility and launch Mojave install

- Copy back all my files on the disk using copy/paste (I think TimeMachine should have work but I did not use it) and reinstall Apps

I still have my 500G available and in the process I freed 80G of useless files

Yep. Still going fine. Running Mojave, 256 gb TarDisk is just SD card. All smoothly running.

I've inspected the Installer Log and it is showing errors related to APFS conversion.

There was actually an active concern leading up to the the High Sierra update about whether TarDisk (which is basically a reverse-engineered Fusion Drive) would be compatible with the new APFS file system that was being introduced. APFS was mandatory for solid state drives but not compatible with Fusion Drives.

TarDisk was asked about this compatibility two years ago on Twitter, but never ultimately answered the question that I can see:

TarDisk, LLC on Twitter: "Backing up your mac before upgrading to OS X Sierra by Luiz Henrique Pimenta Campos: https://t…

But hey, I've been using TarDisk on High Sierra for the past year without trouble and haven't seen any complaints elsewhere, so it seems to have worked out one way or the other.

I have no idea why TarDisk would be having compatibility issues with HPFS now if it was already operating under HPFS in High Sierra (which mandates it for solid state drives), or for that matter why Mojave would need to do an HPFS conversion for a drive that's already on HPFS.

Did the High Sierra update somehow (eventually) read TarDisk as a Fusion Drive during last year's extended High Sierra install, and therefore manage to finally refrain from attempting the HPFS installation? No way for me to tell at the moment, with my machine in the state that it is in. Disk Utility is accessible but for some reason doesn't list the the file system type for the drive.

Whatever the case, Apple did say a while back that it was going to make HPFS compatible with Fusion Drives starting with Mojave, which would mean that the system would now attempt to install HPFS on a TarDisk regardless of whether it reads it as a Fusion Drive or not.

It strikes me as a problem that the TarDisk people wouldn't be all over this already -- practically every last customer they have must surely be affected by it.

I'm going to keep trying.

After many attempts, I was able to get Tardisk to work with Mojave. I had to convert manually to APFS and then a fresh install from a USB drive. After that I was able to migrate from my time machine backup and get things working. The one issue I had was that when I clicked on security and privacy in system preferences, the app would hang and ultimately crash. Everything else worked fine.

As this was not good enough, I have since removed the tardisk, unpaired and installed Mojave fresh. No crashing issues in system preferences and everything runs smooth. I wiped the tardisk and moved my parallels file to the reformatted HFS tardisk. This is untenable as parallels runs much to slowly. If only I could have gotten the security setting in my system preferences to run. All else worked great!

I was able to get my system up and running with some assistance from Luiz at TarDisk. It is actually working well with no known problems. Very smooth and still quick. You do lose the benefit of having APFS as you must downgrade to HFS+. Having said this, I don't see any speed issues. I did inform TarDisk that one of their instructions for writing in terminal needed to be adjusted by adding a space. Let me know if anyone needs help.