After installing High Sierra when it was released, I was initially happy with APFS and gave no care to its relative novelty. Recently I've been using Linux, macOS, and Windows, and having to reboot back into macOS just to grab a file and then copy it to my Windows or Linux partitions is becoming inconvenient and tedious, not to mention a waste of space. I decided that I'd make the attempt to convert my macOS partition back to HFS+. Here are the steps I've taken so far:
- Made a full backup of my internal drive using
gdd
. I've tested this backup and am writing this booted off of it. - Installed macOS High Sierra onto a disk drive (thereby keeping it HFS+).
- Copied all of my macOS files onto this drive using
sudo cp -a
(Target Disk Mode). - Written this HFS+ partition over my APFS partition (
gparted-live
). - Transferred the
Apple_Boot
partition to immediately after the HFS+ partition on my internal drive (Target Disk Mode). - Attempted to boot off of my internal drive.
The resulting HFS+ partition appears as a bootable drive in the hold-Option-at-boot menu, and when I attempt to boot it (verbosely), it throws tons of warnings/errors along the lines of kernel[0]: ... dyld_shared_cache_x86_64': owned by uid=89 instead of 0
, then infinitely outputs Process[32] crashed: opendirectoryd. Too many corpses being created
(number ranging from about 30 to about 150) and increments the number. After powercycling multiple times it now outputs Waiting for DSMOS
before the infinite loop.
Here is a diskutil list
of my internal drive:
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *251.0 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS macOS 169.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot 600.8 MB disk0s3
4: Linux Filesystem 31.5 GB disk0s4
5: Linux Swap 8.5 GB disk0s5
6: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 40.8 GB disk0s6
Given all this, what would be the cleanest way for me to accomplish converting my macOS partition to HFS+, keeping in mind I can start over if needed?
cp
, preferCCC
(Carbon Copy Cloner). Step 4: boot from a bootable USB, and erase as HFS+ case sensitive your MacOS partition. Step 5: reverse Step 3, with CCC. Step 6: it boots!