Help with installing windows with terminal, cannot make partition

[dmon]

Hi I have this ongoing issue where bootcamp always fails to work. I had to work with apple support for over a week to get it working before and it did work. But I decided to re partition my drive to all Mac designated. Now I wish to put bootcamp on there again and have a windows installation. But its back to the same old tricks, when I use the bootcamp assistant in Macosx Mojave it fails at partitioning the drive, when I look with Disk Utility at the drive to try and partition myself the + symbol is greyed out. I know that we got around the issues by using Terminal to partition the drive and install windows.

I am coming from the land of Windows where I was quite an advanced user, I don't get the file system in Macosx yet, it seems confusing with virtual drives within virtual drives.. I have worked in IT and stuff in the past but I am not very used to Macosx. But my gut feeling tells me there is something wrong with the partitioning on the hard drive and I need to delete or move one of the partitions in terminal to get it recognised in disk utility.

I love my mac but this is the one downfall that the bootcamp assistant seems pretty much useless! Because when I look into it there are millions of threads about just the same thing with loads of various reasons and solutions and it's all very overwhelming.

I am using it as a reason to get my head around the file system more on a mac and perhaps use terminal to resolve this issue again. And please do not tell me to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows as we tried this multiple times and it never worked. Strange! But only using terminal could we get to the bottom of it. I have no idea how to retrieve this information.

If anyone could point me in the right direction? Or help talk me through it?

Some stages I went through and the results below...





This is what I get when I use "list" command with Terminal:







Last login: Tue Apr 28 10:42:54 on ttys000



Ds-MacBook-Pro:~ d$ diskutil list



/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):



#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER



0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0



1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1



2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 500.1 GB disk0s2







/dev/disk1 (synthesized):



#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER



0: APFS Container Scheme - +500.1 GB disk1



Physical Store disk0s2



1: APFS Volume Untitled 392.8 GB disk1s1



2: APFS Volume Preboot 44.9 MB disk1s2



3: APFS Volume Recovery 510.5 MB disk1s3



4: APFS Volume VM 3.2 GB disk1s4







Ds-MacBook-Pro:~ d$





This is what Boot Camp Assistant says after it tries to partition the drive for windows:



An error occurred while partitioning the disk. Please run Disk Utility to check and fix the error.



Not too sure which drive I should run repair on, I tried the untitled drive within container disk 1. When I run disk utility it says this:



Running First Aid on “Untitled” (disk1s1)



NOTE: First Aid will temporarily lock the startup volume.



Verifying file system.

Volume could not be unmounted.

Using live mode.

Performing fsck_apfs -n -l -x /dev/rdisk1s1

Checking the container superblock.

Checking the EFI jumpstart record.

Checking the space manager.

Checking the space manager free queue trees.

Checking the object map.

Checking volume.

Checking the APFS volume superblock.

The volume Untitled was formatted by hfs_convert (945.250.134) and last modified by apfs_kext (945.275.8).

Checking the object map.

File system check exit code is 0.

Restoring the original state found as mounted.



Operation successful.





So anyone know what the issue is? Or the next stages to trouble shoot it?

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Boot Camp unfortunately does have its issues. Personally, I recommend using Parallels or VMware Fusion to run Windows within a vitural machine. That is normally good for 95% of Windows users. Only hardcore gaming is better suited for Boot Camp.

I guess it would depend on how you repartitioned your drive - did you use the Boot Camp Assistant or Disk Utility?

Most of the time when you get the error that Boot Camp Assistant cannot partition the drive, and Disk Utility doesn't fix it, you need to completely erase the drive and start all over. Of course, it is always recommended to have a current Time Machine or other backup of your data. That is the nice thing about Parallels/Fusion - you don't need to restart to access Windows, no partitioning needed, and it easy to delete and create a new virtual machine without affected your Mac system and files.

C