Catalina boots and runs on HFS+, but there have been reports of some incompatible apps. I’ve not had any trouble myself but I haven’t used it as my daily driver
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Resolved Is it possible to install Mojave and keep HFS+ ?
- Thread starter Riwam
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Catalina boots and runs on HFS+, but there have been reports of some incompatible apps. I’ve not had any trouble myself but I haven’t used it as my daily driver
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I will try to do it exactly in that way once the final Catalina is issued, which will mean that the Mojave available at that moment will be the final one.
As to myself I do not see any true need to be at the forefront and run the very newest MacOS.
The previous one -Mojave- seems to me, reading all the Catalina related posts, far less complicated than the way in which Catalina was built by Apple.
Ed
Future Mojave security updates will not install unless you have APFS.***********************************
I will try to do it exactly in that way once the final Catalina is issued, which will mean that the Mojave available at that moment will be the final one.
As to myself I do not see any true need to be at the forefront and run the very newest MacOS.
The previous one -Mojave- seems to me, reading all the Catalina related posts, far less complicated than the way in which Catalina was built by Apple.
Ed
You are no doubt right. However I will try to clone my Mojave to an APFS external drive, install the update, and clone back to my HFS+ inner drive.
Since updates in MacOS are not as frequent as in Windows, it will be cumbersome but still doable. If an APFS version of Disk Warrior appears, I will pass entirely to APFS but I am afraid it will never happen
. Disk Warrior has often rebuilt my system when I thought it was incurably messed up. I do not know anything which works as well. Do you?
Just wanting to tell my experience now that Mojavehas reached with 10.14.6 its final issue.
I made two external clones of my High Sierra in HFS+ and upgraded one to Mojave APFS installing afterwards the 2 updates presently offered by Apple.
The second APFS clone was kept as it is following the suggestion long ago by Fishrrman as what he called a “Mule” Partition to be used only for updates.
I made an empty external partition in HFS+ and using CCC I cloned the updated Mojave to it making it bootable and obtaining a Mojave Recovery Partition.
I intended to boot from it and erase the inner HD in HFS+ but found that the Disk Utility of Mojave only allows erasing in APFS.
What followed was probably not the best idea. I booted from an old external Yosemite. Maybe booting from an external High Sierra would have been better.
The Disk Utility of Yosemite did not show me the MacHD but a lot of strange, small partitions
I had no choice but partition the inner drive in 2 volumes, one formatted in HFS+ and the other in NTFS but lost by doing so the contents of my Bootcamp Windows.
At least I could finally clone the Mojave HFS+ external volume to the inner MacHD keeping it in HFS+.
At a certain moment my MP 6.1 crashedand so did my nerfs...but it recovered thanks God!
Since Disk Warrior works with HFS+ (one of the reasons for me to want Mojave in HFS+) I used it to improve the MacHD volume correcting some faulty settings.
Finally using a Winclone Image I had kept I restored my Windows 10 to the NTFS partition of the inner drive.
As can be seen it was a complicated (maybe a bit risky) procedure but now I have Mojave and HFS+ in my MP 6.1.
The future Mojave updates from Apple will most certainly be only safety updates and I will try to use the Mojave APFS “Mule” drive for that.
To sum up, it was neither easy nor ideal but...possible.
Added on January 17. 2020
P.S. I must add that my Windows did not work as good as possible.
In the section of this forum for Windows and other OS I placed a thread explaining how I managed to install a fresh Windows without my not working Bootcamp Assistant, in case somebody has, as I had, a bad experience with that assistant.
I made two external clones of my High Sierra in HFS+ and upgraded one to Mojave APFS installing afterwards the 2 updates presently offered by Apple.
The second APFS clone was kept as it is following the suggestion long ago by Fishrrman as what he called a “Mule” Partition to be used only for updates.
I made an empty external partition in HFS+ and using CCC I cloned the updated Mojave to it making it bootable and obtaining a Mojave Recovery Partition.
I intended to boot from it and erase the inner HD in HFS+ but found that the Disk Utility of Mojave only allows erasing in APFS.
What followed was probably not the best idea.
I booted from an old external Yosemite. Maybe booting from an external High Sierra would have been better.The Disk Utility of Yosemite did not show me the MacHD but a lot of strange, small partitions
I had no choice but partition the inner drive in 2 volumes, one formatted in HFS+ and the other in NTFS but lost by doing so the contents of my Bootcamp Windows.
At least I could finally clone the Mojave HFS+ external volume to the inner MacHD keeping it in HFS+.
At a certain moment my MP 6.1 crashed
and so did my nerfs...but it recovered thanks God!Since Disk Warrior works with HFS+ (one of the reasons for me to want Mojave in HFS+) I used it to improve the MacHD volume correcting some faulty settings.
Finally using a Winclone Image I had kept I restored my Windows 10 to the NTFS partition of the inner drive.
As can be seen it was a complicated (maybe a bit risky) procedure but now I have Mojave and HFS+ in my MP 6.1.
The future Mojave updates from Apple will most certainly be only safety updates and I will try to use the Mojave APFS “Mule” drive for that.
To sum up, it was neither easy nor ideal but...possible.
Added on January 17. 2020
P.S. I must add that my Windows did not work as good as possible.
In the section of this forum for Windows and other OS I placed a thread explaining how I managed to install a fresh Windows without my not working Bootcamp Assistant, in case somebody has, as I had, a bad experience with that assistant.
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Security Update 10.14.6 won't install on my ssd Mojave drive (APFS) Mac Pro 5,1.
The update remains '...available for your Mac'. but when going to Install,
message comes back with 'Updates Not Installed' 'Some updates could not be installed'
There was a Safari update with it and that installed fine though.
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Just discovered that once installed the OS build is 18G1012, which I have.
Yet Software Update still shows it as an available update.
The update remains '...available for your Mac'. but when going to Install,
message comes back with 'Updates Not Installed' 'Some updates could not be installed'
There was a Safari update with it and that installed fine though.
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Just discovered that once installed the OS build is 18G1012, which I have.
Yet Software Update still shows it as an available update.
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....
I made an empty external partition in HFS+ and using CCC I cloned the updated Mojave to it making it bootable and obtaining a Mojave Recovery Partition.
I intended to boot from it and erase the inner HD in HFS+ but found that the Disk Utility of Mojave only allows erasing in APFS.
....
That is actually incorrect. Disk Utility CAN convert APFS drives to HFS+. The key is that Disk Utility can only do this at the CONTAINER level, NOT the VOLUME level.
To do this, select Show All Devices under the View menu in Disk Utility. This will reveal the container for your drive. Now you can right-click the container and select Erase then HFS+ formatting options will be avaialble under the Format menu.
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If the update had installed, you’d be at build 18G2022. You need to clone your drive back to an APFS disk to install any system updates.
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Disk Utility can format, not convert, APFS back to HFS+, but it cannot do so without losing data. It can convert HFS+ disks to APFS losslessly.
Out of curiosity, why do I need to clone back to an APFS disk, I mean why is this not updating to my existing APFS disk?
Nevermind, I missed that. Try to download and run the update manually and look at the installer log if it errors. That may offer some useful information.
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Actually, it turns out there IS a way to clone bootable AFPS drives BUT it is FAR from obvious and requires multiple steps involving creating a Disk Image first.
I FOUND THE SOLUTION by using first creating RELIABLE disk images of APFS drives. It was not easy to figure out. The ONLY path is to make a viable re-usable disk image formatted as APFS and use it as a Restore image or clone, as follows:
1. First create a blank image file formatted as APFS and Read/Write (requires pre-determining size of image file).
IMPORTANT NOTE: The image (destination) cannot be stored on the same drive or partition (source) from which you are going to create the image.
2. use Restore from <volume> to clone to newly created image file
(Highlight destination <volume> then click [Restore] button and select Restore From <volume>.
3. convert image file to Compressed format (Image > Convert).
4. Now you can use this image to Restore to any APFS volume (I have not been able to restore to an HFS+ volume). It contains all the proper "sub" volumes (Pre-Boot, Recovery, VM).
ONLY THEN do you have a reliable APFS image AND clone, especially w/bootable macOS. I have done this repeatedly and it works fine.
ANY other options/paths, are greyed out, yield "Resource busy" or "image is not APFS format" errors or produces image that is not reliable. Even using Apple Internet Recovery tools/boot was the same.
NOTE: you do NOT need to do ANY of this using Recovery tools. You can do this from a live boot of macOS drive. If you do not have a destination to store the image file other than the same internal drive, you can create a partition large enough to store the image file, using Disk Utility. And yes, you can partition macOS boot drive live.
CAVEAT: Tested only using Mojave 10.14.4 on 2019 27" i9 iMac w 40GB RAM and 512GB SSD (no T2 chip), so YMMV.
Apple needs to fix Disk Utility to work straightforward like it used to but with better support for APFS.
I can easily figure the coming problems involved.
However regarding updates (10.14.1, 10.14.2, etc) I am not worried by now.
Following the advise of a clever member of this forum, who said in his post he only upgraded his mac to the last version of the OS previous to any new one just released, I waited until the last High Sierra update was released (10.13.6) and only then I upgraded my Sierra.
I can wait a year until the final Mojave version (with all possible bugs already corrected) is released (at the same time of a coming 10.15) and upgrade to Mojave only then.
My question was if it is possible (meaning feasable without ruining the OS or harming the hardware for instance regarding the firmware update which apparently is done now when installing Mojave), to have running the OS Mojave with HFS+ file system still kept, and the best and less complicated way to achieve it.
Thank you very much in advance for any help!
Regards
Ed
Aple will continue to release security updates for at least two years after releasing the last version of an OS. Just because you are on the last version it doesn’t mean you will not need to install updates.
EDIT:
I have just noticed how old this thread is, so I guess it is all a bit irrelevant at this stage.
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I boot Mojave 10.14.6 ( build 18G2022 ) from a 500gb Samsung 970 EVO Plus formatted to HFS+
I originally installed Mojave 10.14.6 to an APFS formatted 970 EVO 256gb, installed the latest Security Update and then CCC'd it to the above 970 EVO Plus.
At the end of each week I CCC clone the boot drive back to the APFS 970 EVO etc. This is my backup drive.
I have had no problems with my HFS+ 10.14.6 clone at all. Boots everytime.
If Apple releases a Security up date I install that to the backup drive . . . then . . . clone the backup 970 EVO back to the 970 EVO Plus HFS+ blade.
Keeps me up to date.
I doubt that there will be any updates to APFS for Mojave but there possibly will for Catalina and subsequent Mac OS releases as APFS matures. But I won't even think about Catalina until it is well and truly final and even then maybe not.
Preview
I originally installed Mojave 10.14.6 to an APFS formatted 970 EVO 256gb, installed the latest Security Update and then CCC'd it to the above 970 EVO Plus.
At the end of each week I CCC clone the boot drive back to the APFS 970 EVO etc. This is my backup drive.
I have had no problems with my HFS+ 10.14.6 clone at all. Boots everytime.
If Apple releases a Security up date I install that to the backup drive . . . then . . . clone the backup 970 EVO back to the 970 EVO Plus HFS+ blade.
Keeps me up to date.
I doubt that there will be any updates to APFS for Mojave but there possibly will for Catalina and subsequent Mac OS releases as APFS matures. But I won't even think about Catalina until it is well and truly final and even then maybe not.
Preview
Yeah this is my anticipated boot and backup architecture as well, except that my Mojave boot volume will be an HFS+ formatted RAID 0 on twin SSDs. And I clone every night, so I always have an up-to-date image ready for any system updates that show up.