Best way to start with a fully APFS drive?

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Best way to start with a fully APFS drive?

Postby mr_wazoo » Tue Jun 04, 2019 5:54 pm

Hey all.

Currently running Mojave on my Macbook Pro on a fully APFS drive. I've been testing out ZFS using just a file as a pool and so far I really like it a lot, but I want to take it to the next level by actually using part of my drive as a pool instead of a file. Not sure where to start, though. Can I just create a new APFS volume and use that? Should I repartition part of the drive itself as HFS+ or some other format beforehand? If someone could help steer me in the right direction, that'd be great.

Thanks.
mr_wazoo
 
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Re: Best way to start with a fully APFS drive?

Postby abc123 » Tue Jun 04, 2019 10:08 pm

I've been through this last week. The steps were something like this:

1. You may need to remove local snapshots so Disk Utiltity can resize your partition. use sudo tmutil listlocalsnapshots / and then e.g. sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots 2019-05-24-191742 for each one (there shouldn't be too many otherwise you may want to write a script to do it)
2. Launch disk utility and add a new partition fo ZFS (formatted HFS journaled).
3. I think an important step is to use gdisk to change the partition type of the HFS partition as per https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Suppressi ... ing_pop-up I installed gdisk using MacPorts but had to reboot in to recovery mode to disable csr to be able to change the partition type. Without this, Mojave would sometimes mount the partition as HFS even after creating a zpool, corrupting the zpool. This seems to stop happening after rI put lots of data on the pool so perhaps just zeroing the entire partition with dd would be enough to stop it deciding it's an HFS partition.
4. Unmount the HFS partition
5. You should then be able to create a zpool as per https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Zpool#Creating_a_pool
abc123
 
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