Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Mike S to All on Thu Oct 01 2015 02:13 am

Hi All.

Does anyone know of a utility I can get, or a way I can Apple's Disk
Utility to reformat an entire harddrive? A while back I tried to use
Apple's BootCamp to repartition my drive and install Windows 7 on it and have a dual boot machine, but it screwed up during the install. So now my iMac has a 100G partition I can't use right in the middle of a 3Tb drive, and it now has the other 2 partitions listed as a logical drive.

use linux
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Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Mike S to All on Thu Oct 01 2015 02:13:00

Does anyone know of a utility I can get, or a way I can Apple's Disk Utility to reformat an entire harddrive? A while back I tried to use Apple's BootCamp to repartition my drive and install Windows 7 on it and have a dual boot machine, but it screwed up during the install. So now my iMac has a 100G partition I can't use right in the middle of a 3Tb drive, and it now has the other 2 partitions listed as a logical drive.

The heart of OS X is Darwin, a variant oF BSD UNIX. The command-line tools fdisk (for partitioning) and newfs (for formatting) should be available, included with the OS.

Nightfox

Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Mro to Mike S on Thu Oct 01 2015 07:30 pm

Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Mike S to All on Thu Oct 01 2015 02:13 am

Hi All.

Does anyone know of a utility I can get, or a way I can Apple's Disk Utility to reformat an entire harddrive? A while back I tried to use Apple's BootCamp to repartition my drive and install Windows 7 on it and have a dual boot machine, but it screwed up during the install. So now my iMac has a 100G partition I can't use right in the middle of a 3Tb drive, and it now has the other 2 partitions listed as a logical drive.

use linux

Thanks for that wonderful tip! Using a shell I have managed (after backing up the drive to an external one) to reformat the entire drive using a utility called diskutil, and then I was able to use the normal Apple Disk Utility to repartition the drive. I got OSX reinstalled on the drive (or I should say restored rather than reinstalled), but I haven't tried using the Bootcamp program to install Windows 7 yet. It was Bootcamp that screwed up the drive
in the first place so I'm a but hesitant to retry it now, but then I probably should do it now, so if it does screwup the drive again fixing it is still fresh in my mind. Normally Bootcamp is used to repartition the boot drive by shrinking the existing partition & creating a Windows partition. When I was partitioning the drive I set it up with 2 partitions, one for OSX and a
smaller one for Windows. So now I have a 500Gb FAT32 partition on my drive which I'm hoping Bootcamp will recognize and use to install Windows into.

I'm a bit worried as Disk Utility shows the partition as a Windows Data partition, not being all that familiar with Windows, does the partition need
to be a different kind of Windows partition in order to be the boot (or
system) partition?

-MikeS

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Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Nightfox to Mike S on Thu Oct 01 2015 06:53 pm

Re: Formatting an iMac HD
By: Mike S to All on Thu Oct 01 2015 02:13:00

Does anyone know of a utility I can get, or a way I can Apple's Disk Utility to reformat an entire harddrive? A while back I tried to use Apple's BootCamp to repartition my drive and install Windows 7 on it an have a dual boot machine, but it screwed up during the install. So now iMac has a 100G partition I can't use right in the middle of a 3Tb driv and it now has the other 2 partitions listed as a logical drive.

The heart of OS X is Darwin, a variant oF BSD UNIX. The command-line tools fdisk (for partitioning) and newfs (for formatting) should be available, included with the OS.

Nightfox

Yes, that's basically what I ended up doing. I used the 'diskutil' program to reformat the drive. They call it zeroing the disk, but whatever you want to call it, it did what I needed, sort of. I still haven't been able to do what
I originally set out to do, which is to install Windows7 onto a midsized partition (500Gb) on my 3Tb internal HD. Apple supplies a program called Boot Camp Assistant, the first time I ran it, everything seemed to go ok, except
it didn't work. It left my system with a large unusable partition right in
the middle of the drive where the Windows partition was supposed to be, and
it split my Mac partition into 1 logical volume that had 2 physical
partitions.

Once I was able to fix this problem by copying everything to an external drive, reformatting the internal drive, copying everything back, I was ready
to go with attempt 2 of installing Windows. Right away it was no-go. When I repartitioned the drive I selected an option that Bootcamp is incompatible with. Instead of using the 'normal' journaled setting, I had set it to create the partition as one that's case sensitive. ok, so back to starting from the external drive again, change it to case insensative, and everything should go fine. Yea right! Now Bootcamp tells me it can't work on a drive that has more than one partition on it. Lucky for me the GUI program Disk Utility can make
a partition larger or smaller without harming the contents of the drive (as long as there's room of course), so I delete the empty Windows partition,
make the Mac partition the full size of the drive, and give it another go.
Now it still gives me the message about needing only a single partition.

At this point I'm going to take this as a pointer to the fact that if there's
a higher power, then he (or she) doesn't want me installing windows on my
iMac! That is of course unless somebody here can point me to instructions on how I can do this manually. At the moment due to the copying and reformatting of my drive the drive isn't fragmented, and there's only 404Gb used out of
3Tb, so I could resize the partition and recreate a 500Gb partition to
install Windows into.

I've also been thinking of getting on of the programs that allows running Windows within a window in MacOSX. If I do that, would I still be better off installing Windows into it's own phyical partition rather than using a file under Darwin to hold the entire FAT43 filesystem.

At this point I'm kind of confused about what I want to do, how I want to do it, etc. so any help (real help, not snide remarks like 'get linux' etc.)
would be appreciated) would be greatly apprecated. Thanks!

-MikeS

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