Problem transferring to setup new laptop

[conejo]

and sorry to be such a pain in the ass on a beautiful Saturday. At least it's beautiful here in Austin. I appreciate your help, Dave.

[dnanian]

Ah. So, as I indicated in my most recent blog post, if the major file system type (e.g. APFS, HFS+) isn't the same, we just reformat the drive and retain its format.

So, that just erased, it didn't reformat. You'll have to reformat it yourself to be case insensitive (or APFS case insensitive)...

[conejo]

So can I do that in Disk Utility or do I need another app to do this? Looks like the next step in DU would be 'erase', the 'partition' option is greyed out. I'm assuming that means DU only 'sees' something it can partition if it's blank. And, can one partition of several be reformatted while leaving the other partitions alone, or will it need to do the entire disk and all the partitions at the same time?

[dnanian]

You do it in Disk Utility. See the "Murtaugh's Lament" post at the blog.

[conejo]

ok, I tried to follow those instructions but things aren't cooperating. I erased the entire external drive but it didn't allow me the option to select GUID and then APFS. It only gave me 4 options: mac os ext journaled, then the same with case sensitive, ms-fat and exfat. That's it. I went ahead and erased everything, blowing away the existing partitions and using mac os ex journaled, thought maybe it would let me format to apfs while creating new partitions, but no joy. The partition button is still greyed out.

Am I doing something wrong? Now I'm nervous because I don't have a currently cloned backup of my laptop.

[dnanian]

You must be. If you turn on all devices, then select the physical drive hardware above the volumes, then click Erase, your should have the options to use GUID/GPT partitioning and APFS.

[conejo]

Ok, I think I figured it out. Needed to erase at the whole device level and it's under the boot record where I can select GUID. Did that, then was able to use the context menu to convert to APFS and now I'm creating partitions. Will report back but hopefully I'm good now. Thanks again.

[dnanian]

You shouldn't need to convert to APFS: you should have been able to erase as APFS...?