#How to partition a mac fusion drive how to

#How to partition a mac fusion drive how to

Next IвЂ™ll be posting an article about how to get Windows installed on a 3 TB or larger drive. As of this writing, Boot Camp only supports drives up to 2.2 TB in size. As expected, since OS X requires Boot Camp to be last among the first 4 partitions on the drive, the Windows volume is partition 4. The Windows partition and a recovery partition exist entirely on the standard drive. Similar, if not identical, to File Vault 2. A closer look at the mounted partition showed only the basic system files needed by core storage.

It could be that the Apple_Boot is the OS X System installed on the SSD, but it looked more like the partition to boot into a File Vault 2 volume. To break the Fusion drive should be quite simple, I believe: Boot the iMac from an Arch Linux installation USB stick, do lsblk to identify the two drives, then do dd if/dev/urandom of /dev/ for both disks to erase all information at the beginning of the disks (just write a few MBs), and that should do the job.

However, the SSD has its own Apple_Boot partition. Both have a GUID partition scheme and an EFI partition, as expected.

As you would expect, there is a Core Storage partition on both the SSD drive and the standard drive. Back in OS X, I checked out the GUID partition table: I then used Winclone to restore a Windows image to the FAT32 partition I created in Disk Utility, booted it up and it worked great! From the Disk Management utility in Windows 7, the disk looks like this:ДЄs expected, Windows sees it as two separate drives. So I created a new partition in Disk Utility, and sure enough Disk Utility only allowed creation of one additional partition, which could be either HFS+ or FAT32/exFAT. The technology behind core storage has been well-covered in the blogosphere, but a question remained: how does Disk Utility handle repartitioning the drive and how does it appear in Windows? The terminal shot of the core storage view above shows the different drives. Once it arrived, I looked at the Fusion Drive in Disk Utility and it displayed as a single drive and partition: AppleвЂ™s support document said that you can create two partitions AND THAT IS ALL YOU GET, SO GOOD DAY SIR.ДЄt the Apple store I had to special order a Mac Mini with the Fusion Drive. The question remained about how Boot Camp is supported on the Fusion drive.