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macOS High Sierra (10.13) Unsupported Macs Thread
- Thread starter foxlet
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If the patches were applied successfully, you should be able to see the helper boot partition (EFI Boot) regardless of whether you can actually boot from an external APFS drive connected via FireWire.
When you were applying the patches, did you see a message saying something like "Applying the APFS Patch, this can take some time..." ?
When you ran the Post Patch utility and selected your APFS volume. did it automatically deselect the Recovery Partition patches and select the APFS patch instead?
If he was using v2.1.1 or higher then it did that automatically, which would rule on this problem.
Has anyone before tried installing APFS High Sierra (or HFS+ for that matter) on an external drive using @dosdude1's method?
I've been installing HFS High Sierra on an external USB drive for weeks now. I can try converting that volume to APFS and installing the APFS patches later tonight.
As I suspected, the problem here may lie with the current state of the apfs conversion code in diskutil. Using my USB drive with a working patched HFS High Sierra installation as the starting point, I ran the 'diskutil apfs convert' command but it emits an error code on exit...
I ran Disk Utility on the resulting APFS partition and it claimed to do a successful repair. However when you apply the APBS post patch the progress bar immediately jumps to completion without actually creating the helper _BOOT partition.
I'll try a different tactic here to separate out the buggy apfs conversion issues from the APFS booting on removal media issue by reformatting the external drive and cloning the working SATA drive APFS partition using Carbon Copy Cloner. I suspect this will produce a usable APFS volume for successfully applying the APFS post patch.
[doublepost=1503868438][/doublepost]Note that creating an empty JHFS+ volume on the external USB drive and the running 'diskutil apfs convert' completes without error.
I ran Disk Utility on the resulting APFS partition and it claimed to do a successful repair. However when you apply the APBS post patch the progress bar immediately jumps to completion without actually creating the helper _BOOT partition.
I'll try a different tactic here to separate out the buggy apfs conversion issues from the APFS booting on removal media issue by reformatting the external drive and cloning the working SATA drive APFS partition using Carbon Copy Cloner. I suspect this will produce a usable APFS volume for successfully applying the APFS post patch.
[doublepost=1503868438][/doublepost]Note that creating an empty JHFS+ volume on the external USB drive and the running 'diskutil apfs convert' completes without error.
It appears the the APFS patch application isn't working on APFS volumes residing on external USB. I replicated the steps that I used to create the SATA based APFS installation by erasing the external USB drive as JHFS+, running 'diskutil apfs convert'. .. which completed without error messages and then using Carbon Copy Cloner 5.0 to clone my working SATA APFS partition onto the USB APFS partition followed by applying the APFS patch. I see the same behavior as before where the APFS patching prematurely 'completes' without creating the BOOT partition. Interestingly, it also seems to mangle my SATA APFS boot partition so I had to reapply the APFS patch on that one to recover booting from it.
Is that a cloned install? If that's the case, the reason why it's modifying your SATA boot partition is because it writes a file to the root of your APFS partition, which the patch then reads if applied a second time so it knows what boot partition it needs to modify, without unnecessarily re-creating another one.
So we need to find the root cause of this and fix it, or move to foxlet's method when the GM appears if we want an APFS file system with usable Messages and FaceTime.
[doublepost=1503880483][/doublepost]What I find hard to understand is what is APFS doing to block Messages and FaceTime authentication that HFS+ is not? I can sign in and out of HS on an HFS+ SSD until the cows come home without problems, but sign out once on APFS and that's it.
It does not seem to be "calling home" at boot because we can convert a working HFS+ to APFS and it continues to work. Does that mean a new sign-in is creating a new key using the file system attributes + motherboard ID, etc., in some way? Is the UUID different between the same SSD formatted HFS+ and APFS?
Just brainstorming.
And one thing is clear, there are no iClouddassistant and Facetime loops in KeyChain Access on an APFS conversion of a working HFS+ system.
[doublepost=1503880483][/doublepost]What I find hard to understand is what is APFS doing to block Messages and FaceTime authentication that HFS+ is not? I can sign in and out of HS on an HFS+ SSD until the cows come home without problems, but sign out once on APFS and that's it.
It does not seem to be "calling home" at boot because we can convert a working HFS+ to APFS and it continues to work. Does that mean a new sign-in is creating a new key using the file system attributes + motherboard ID, etc., in some way? Is the UUID different between the same SSD formatted HFS+ and APFS?
Just brainstorming.
And one thing is clear, there are no iClouddassistant and Facetime loops in KeyChain Access on an APFS conversion of a working HFS+ system.
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Great job...had issues during the installation but it was related to the Mac OS version I had, d/led a fresh copy and the install was fine with the apfs file system, but there was a message during setup telling me this Mac would not be able to create new accounts. Need to go back in the threads, I am sure this was discussed. As per other posts able to logon to Icloud but not FaceTime or messages....
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I've finally figured out a new APFS booting method, that allows iMessage/FaceTime/etc. to work as intended, and doesn't require a helper partition. Going to take a bit to get this implementation working as intended, so I'll post an update once it's ready.
So basically, if you clone a SATA drive's APFS patched partition with Carbon Copy Cloner,, when applying the APFS patch again on the cloned partition now residing on an external USB drive, it assumes you still want to use the helper partition over on the SATA drive. Oddly, in my brief testing with that configuration, HS on the external USB drive couldn't boot and produced the null icon during the second stage of the boot process.It is fortunate that you have found a workaround that avoids the helper partition and that method does have far too many corner cases to deal with.
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Can you give a brief description of the methodology this new approach will use? Also, is your local testing limited to internal SATA drives or do you also do any testing on external hard drives attached by USB or firewire?
Great news, thank you very much.
Btw, I was borred so I tried to call Apple support to see if they can see whats going on with iM and FaceTime.
After 45 min of trying they were confused why its not working.
They couldn't fix it.
But we have @dosdude1 and his magic
Yes but Apple clearly doesn't want it as a default boot drive for hard drives and fusion drives just yet. There has to be a reason. Plus, according to Bombich software, documentation on snapshots hasn't been published yet and we're just a few weeks away from a final High Sierra product. This tells me that APFS is probably not ready for prime time except for SSDs, which has a fair amount of data on its usage from the iOS/tvOS devices.
I'm old enough to remember when Apple published System 3.0 back in 1986 when HFS was first introduced. That System had a bad habit of losing people's data. I remember back in college at the computer science center making sure that people's floppys were upgraded to System 3.2 when it came out which was the first version of HFS that was truly stable.
I'm not saying this is going to happen with APFS. The lessons with iOS/tvOS have been promising to say the least. And this crowd is certainly ok with being bleeding edge. But I can't say I'm trying to push to get my Mac 3,1 with a Fusion Boot drive (and a SoftRAID array) up and running on APFS anytime soon.
I am not having any major issues using an APFS partition on my old SATA2 hard drive in a MacPro 3,1 aside from the known helper partition oddities relative to iCloud/Facetime/Messages. I suspect it is mostly a matter of Apple trying to not 'drink from the fire hose' in terms of APFS related bug reports. Considering the glitches remaining, it seems like they may be in for a rough ride when they deploy APFS upon the initial release of High Sierra.
ps The most serious issue IMHO is glitches like https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=81797 which are common to all types of storage devices under APFS.
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Great news, thank you very much.
Btw, I was borred so I tried to call Apple support to see if they can see whats going on with iM and FaceTime.
After 45 min of trying they were confused why its not working.
They couldn't fix it.
I wouldn't be calling up Apple about hacked installations of macOS on unsupported hardware. IMHO, we are rather lucky that Steve Jobs isn't still around because I am sure he would have shut down that activity in a heart beat. However I am interested to know if anyone else has had their iCloud access disabled from using an APFS/helper partition combination to login beside foxlet. I really find it hard to believe that Apple would have implemented anything like that as it could so easily be turned back against them by hackers to disable known AppleIDs on a mass scale.
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I never said they do want it to be default for HDDs, nor that it should. It's just that APFS was designed and optimized for SSDs primarily. And the reason behind their reluctance to make it default also on HDDs could very well be that they just haven't spent enough time testing it on HDDs themselves plus they lack meaningful user data from the real world, too. That may have been either intentional or just a result of time constraint. It is strange though, that you are/you will be able to use APFS even on external HDDs. If you do not intend it to be the default filesystem also on HDDs machines at some point, then why not just make it SSD-exclusive? I guess time will tell.
I on the other hand look forward to it. HFS+ is old, has many shortcomings and it's definitely not the way to go forward. Something like APFS was inevitable, I'm surprised it took them this long (not to play down the amount of work that goes into creating a whole new filesystem, and one that has to run on many different devices, from desktops, through tablets and phones, to watches). APFS has many perks I'm excited about. It's not all rainbows and unicorns, though. I'm very disappointed there's no real data integrity (checksums on user-data, not just APFS's own metadata), something akin to ZFS.
I do have faith, though. Like you said, what we've seen with iOS/tvOS have been promising. Converting millions of iPhones to APFS with the update to iOS 10.3 went smooth and without problems. That's a big achievement. Fun fact, they have been actually silently converting our iPhones to APFS and then back to HFS(X) during several iOS updates prior to 10.3. This gave them confidence they can really do that at scale with 10.3.
Anyway, I'm happy to discuss it more, but please PM me if you have more thoughts. I don't want to turn this thread into a conversation about APFS, it's not what it's for
.The problem does exist in virtualization which is a supported way to run OS X. That would be an appropriate bug to file.
Just finished adding my new APFS boot implementation to macOS High Sierra Patcher! This method does not require a helper partition, and allows iMessage/FaceTime/etc. to work as they should. One current limitation is that it doesn't support booting from multiple APFS volumes on a single drive, however that will be fixed relatively soon. For now, though, give it a test and let me know how it works! Download available on my webpage, as usual. For those of you using the old implementation, just re-create your USB drive with the tool, boot from it, use Disk Utility to remove your helper partition, and then open the post-install tool and apply the APFS patch.
I have no problem with calling Apple support. In fact, they helped me many many times with iCloud/iM/FaceTime issues while I was building Hackintosh for people. Apple log and store various ID's from your OS X device's such as MLB, ROM and Hardware UUID each time you attempt to log into/authenticate with iMessage's servers. These ID's must be valid and are verified against black lists. As long as they are, you are OK. The most important thing is to make sure that your S/N is valid and unregistered(for hackintosh) and thats where Clover comes with its "Magic Wand" option.