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Update: Apple has released OS X 10.8.3 which includes “Boot Camp support for Macs with a 3TB hard drive”. A first quick check confirms that the Boot Camp Assistant now launches on my iMac with a 3 TB Fusion Drive without the previous error message. It even seems to recognize the Windows installation I did manually as described in this blog post. I did not (yet) try to delete my installation and re-install it using the ‘official’ method. Anyway, the supported version is of course preferable to any hacks. I will keep this blog post online for future reference though.

Continue reading the original post:

So I got myself a shiny new iMac with a 3 TB Fusion Drive after using my old iMac for nearly three years now. Although I’m using OS X exclusively for work I wanted to install Boot Camp to play the occasional game that’s not available for the Mac.

Was I in for a surprise when the Boot Camp Assistant greeted me with a friendly “installing windows is not supported on this Mac”. As it turns out that’s a known limitation of 3 TB HDDs in general.

Anyway, after some quick research on the Internets I found some threads and blog posts with proposed solutions. Since I combined stuff from all of these I wanted to share my personal experience here — which works very well for over a month now.

In short, you can’t boot Windows from a partition at the end of the 3 TB Fusion Drive mainly since you can’t boot from beyond a 2 TB size limit. So what we’re going to do is to break the current partition configuration and create a new one where the Windows partition is located “earlier” in the partition table.

What you need

• A full backup of your Mac via Time Machine — this is not only a precaution, we’re going to use that in the process.
• A Windows 7 installation on a bootable USB stick (I created mine using the Boot Camp Assistant on my old Mac).

Getting ready

• Backup your Mac via Time Machine to an external hard drive. Make sure there’s nothing excluded in the Time Machine options. We’re going to use this backup to restore your Mac later. Disconnect the external drive from your computer when the backup has completed to avoid confusion.
• Reboot your Mac and hold down CMD-R during reboot to enter recovery mode.
• Launch ‘Terminal’ via the ‘Utilities’ menu.
• Check out the current disk configuration using diskutil list and diskutil coreStorage list. These two commands show you the current configuration of the physical disks and the logical Fusion Drive configuration. I would suggest using these command after performing each of the following steps to check your progress.
• If you’re using a non-US keyboard layout (as am I) switch the layout in the upper right hand corner of the screen to make your life easier.

Re-configuring your disks

Be warned: Executing the following command will completely erase your computer! Make sure you have your Time Machine backup ready (but don’t connect the external drive right now).

First of all we’re going to delete the Core Storage Logical Volume by using the command. You’ll find the ID by using diskutil coreStorage list.

diskutil coreStorage deleteVolume {insert ID of the 'Logical Volume', sized 3.1 TB}

Next we’re deleting the Core Storage Volume Group by executing the following command. Again, find the ID by using diskutil coreStorage list.

diskutil coreStorage delete {insert ID of the 'Logical Volume Group'}

The next command will repartition the 3 TB hard disk drive. This will create three partitions, one with 1.5 TB for OS X, one with 500 GB for Windows and a last one filling up the rest of the HDD for use by OS X. You may change the sizes but make sure that the first two don’t add up to more than 2 TB! That’s the limit where your Windows partition has to be in order to boot from it. In my case the name of the HDD was disk1. Use diskutil list to check on that.

diskutil partitionDisk {insert name of HDD} 3 HFS+ "Macintosh HD" 1.5TB MS-DOS "WINDOWS" 500G HFS+ "Macintosh Data" R

Now recreate the Fusion Drive by executing the following command. Make sure that the disk names fit your system. disk0s2 is the SSD main partition (sized at 120 GB) on my system, disk1s2 the 1.5 TB partition on my HDD which we just created and disk1s4 the partition that fills up the rest of the HDD.

diskutil coreStorage create "Macintosh HD" disk0s2 disk1s2 disk1s4

Last but not least you create a Core Storage Volume by issuing the following command. Use diskutil coreStorage list again to retrieve the ID.

diskutil coreStorage createVolume {insert ID of Logical Volume Group} JHFS+ "Macintosh HD" 100%

You can now exit Terminal since we’re done here.

Installing Windows

I rebooted my Mac with the Windows installation USB stick plugged in and installed Windows 7 (64 Bit) as the next step. Hold down ‘ALT’ to boot from the stick. Be careful to choose the right partition when installing Windows. It should be labelled ‘WINDOWS’ and you can also recognize it by its size of around 500 GB.

Make sure you don’t have any other USB drives connected during the installation process to avoid confusion.

Windows will probably complain that installing to that partition is not possible but that’s only because it’s not NTFS formatted. You can use the Windows installer to format the partition accordingly.

Restoring OS X from the Time Machine backup

After having installed Windows successfully I rebooted by Mac into recovery mode once more (holding down CMD-R during reboot) and chose ‘Restore from Time Machine backup’ in the main menu to restore OS X to the Fusion Drive. And after restoring the full backup to my internal disk I was able to reboot and chose the operating system of my liking by holding down ‘ALT’ during reboot.

Known Issues

There’s only one thing that seems to be a bit odd: I don’t seem to be able to boot into Windows when I have a USB drive connected to my Mac. Switching external drives off allows me to boot into Windows with no problems. I can even switch them on after I have booted Windows and they work just fine under Windows or OS X. I just can’t have them connected during the Windows boot process (the OS X boot process works just fine).

Useful other sources

These are the main sources where I collected my information:

• Thread on the Macrumors forum
• Blog post by Jochem Berends

Thanks a lot especially to Jochem.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m @gonecoding on Twitter.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Having attended Macoun last year I will give the very first Objective-Cologne conference a try this year. Coming from Cologne myself I very much look forward to having an Objective-C/Cocoa conference right here in front of my door step.

I also immediately liked the international concept of the conference which led to a great “line-up” of speakers. Since in my eyes the developer community is a global one I found that a bit of a shortcoming of Macoun which is completely in German.

Oh, and of course I love the logo which includes a reference to Cologne’s historical landmark.

Ping me if you’re going and want to meet up.

Brilliant seeding of a rumor that fell on very fertile soil:

One afternoon we sketched out a screw in our 3D program, a very strange screw where the head was neither a star, tracks, pentalobe or whatever, but a unique form, also very impractical. We rendered the image, put it in an email, sent it to ourselves, took a picture of the screen with the mail and anonymously uploaded the image to the forum Reddit with the text ”A friend took a photo a while ago at that fruit company, they are obviously even creating their own screws”.

Then we waited …

Lukasz Lindell continues to report that within hours the shocking “news” had spread around on the usual suspects: Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and even on renowned news sites like Yahoo, Wired and MacWorld.

Till Eulenspiegel at its best.

(via Daring Fireball)