elliotberry

I ran in to a problem with a new Western Digital hard drive (2TB) for use as a Time Machine backup drive on High Sierra. After plugging it in, I kept getting errors like "MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation." After some digging, it appeared that this is an issue in macOS with initializing APFS from an NTFS partition.

Pulling out some old utils, I used diskutil and dd to fix the issue:

$ disktuil list
...
/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk4

elliotberry

For a 256-block image:   (I see the same for 246-block images)

   1 block for main (current checkpoint's) container superblock
   8 blocks for previous checkpoints and container superblocks
  52 blocks for space manager and related objects
  16 blocks for future expansion?
   6 blocks for allocation info file blocks
------
  83

elliotberry

catie:/Projects/small (master) ✓ ⇢  sudo diskutil mount -mountPoint /usr/local /dev/disk1s9
Volume on disk1s9 failed to mount
Perhaps the operation is not allowed by the invoking user (kDAReturnNotPrivileged)
This appears to be an APFS Volume; note that locked APFS volumes
will not mount unless unlocked (e.g. "diskutil apfs unlockVolume")
 catie:/Projects/small (master) ✓ ⇢  sudo diskutil apfs unlockVolume Local
Passphrase:
Unlocking any cryptographic user on APFS Volume disk1s9
Error unlocking APFS Volume: The given APFS Volume is not encrypted (-69593)
 catie:/Projects/small (master) ✓ ⇢  sudo diskutil mount -mountPoint /usr/local /dev/disk1s9

elliotberry

After cloning APFS drives using Disk Utility it usually ends with a volume containing ContainerToInvert file with the size of a cloned partition.

Don't be afraid, using the following steps you can mount this file as APFS container and get all partitions.

1. Requirements
We need FUSE and xmount installed

2. Terminal
Open Terminal app and type the following:
$ sudo mkdir /Volumes/apfs_image/

elliotberry

1. Boot into Recovery mode (by pressing CMD+R while boot macOS)

2. Unmount APFS volumes automaticaly mounted by Recovery (where /dev/disk2 is your APFS container)

    $ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
    Unmount of all volumes on disk2 was successful
  
3. Unlock APFS volumes (in case FileVault enabled for this volume)

    $ diskutil apfs unlockVolume /dev/disk2s1 -nomount

elliotberry

➜  ~ sw_vers
ProductName:	Mac OS X
ProductVersion:	10.12.1
BuildVersion:	16B2333a


➜  ~ ls -l /System/Library/Filesystems/apfs.fs/Contents/Resources
total 2088
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  349760 22 Sep 03:48 apfs.util
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  352880 22 Sep 03:48 apfs_invert

elliotberry

ASR(8) - System Manager's Manual

NAME

asr - Apple Software Restore; copy volumes (e.g. from disk images)

SYNOPSIS

asr verb

elliotberry

https://matt.sh/apfs-object-map-free-recovery

APFS Object Map Recovery (free)
APFS Object Map Recovery
I spent a day figuring out how to look into a corrupt encrypted APFS partition. Here’s the notes.

If you only care about the answer, jump to the last section.

Kernel Panic
macOS hard panicked on me with a graphics driver corruption error com.apple.iokit.IOAcceleratorFamily2 (which happened after seven “gpuRestart” logs were generated back-to-back).

elliotberry

Verify and Repair Disk Permissions via Terminal (Mac OS X)

Verify Permissions

diskutil verifyPermissions /

Repair Permissions

diskutil repairPermissions /

elliotberry

Verify and Repair Disk Permissions via Terminal (Mac OS X)

Verify Permissions

diskutil verifyPermissions /

Repair Permissions

diskutil repairPermissions /