Hi,
im going to sperate my fusiondrive in order to get my boot camp partition on the SSD part.
(Imac 2019, 2TB Fusiondrive, Mojave 10.14.5, Win 10 pro in boot camp partition)
All manuals i found, all using winclone, are relatet to earlier versions, without apfs. So I have some questions before I start.
As I learnd, winclone 7 works fine with apfs and mojave. In my setting, do I have to partition the SDD with apfs?
The (quite old) manual asks me to
- Seperate the fusiondrive
- Partition the SSD for boot camp, using the command: diskutil partitionDisk disk0 2 GPTFormat fat32 BOOTCAMP 100G jhfs+ coreStorage R
- Then re-organise both drives to fusiondrive (as I learnd, boot camp only works, when the boot camp partition is on the same drive as the mac os.)
- Then restore the winclone win-image to the just prepared boot camp partition
Question A:
This manual says, format the boot camp partition fat32. The winclone forum says format the destination volume in ntfs. But Mojave prefers to work with apfs. So I m confused.
With winclone 7, do I have to change the part oft the command „GPTFormat fat32“ to something with apfs?
Maybe there is a difference in restoring in a existing boot camp partition or restoring on a empty drive?
Question B:
Is it possible to quit step 2 and 3. Will Winclone create a bootable boot camp Win10 installation on this drive, even without a mac Os on the same drive?
The important part about formatting is that it be a format the Winclone recognizes as “Windows related”. The volume format is changed to NTFS regardless of the initial format. It is just an indicator to Winclone that this is the volume that is available for restore.
As for APFS and the disk, the Boot Camp partition is a separate physical partition. APFS is both a format and a system of virtual volumes. An APFS container is on a physical partition, may contain multiple APFS volumes, which in turn can be formatted with the APFS filesystem. NTFS, on the other hand, resides on a physical partition. Since APFS containers and NTFS are on different physical partitions, they don’t tend to interact together. The important piece is that they both must be on a GPT (GUID Partition Table) disk. This is what defines how the disk organizes physical partitions, and also contains a EFI partition, which macOS uses to determine which partition holds the bootable Windows partition.
With APFS, a fusion drive has 2 different drives, where 2 APFS volumes (one from each physical drive, on a physical partition) are combined into a single APFS partition.
I am not sure about the “boot camp only works if it is on the same drive as macOS”. From what we have seen, booting is dependent on the Mac firmware and the GPT/EFI partition rather than how it is related to macOS.
All that being said, the tools that macOS uses (like Disk Utility) can become confused when custom partitioning schemes are uses. While what you are proposing may indeed work, I usually recommend having a single SSD that has both macOS and Windows on it. I know that might not be an option for you, but that it may help in the future. I paid extra to get a 1 TB drive in my MacBook Pro, and it was worth the extra money for me.
I hope that helps.
tim