Install High Sierra Public Beta to a new partition (APFS)

[Henties]

The synthesised partitions from converting an HFS+ root will be different to restoring an HFS+ volume to an APFS one, there is an example in the OP where you can see the boot helper partition. Also the latest version of the EFI driver remains necessary for Clover to read APFS partitions (there was a second "APFS Jump Start Driver" driver needed in the past, that one is no longer needed)

Thanks will extract the APFS driver from the install image or HS USB installer, will then study the OP again as I seem to have missed something, and give it another try.
I am not too much in a hurry as I am only experimenting to gain some insight into this new filesystem. What bugs me is that the APFS design "tries" to ensure data integrity of native Apple SSD's only whereas the SSD's that are used in the Hackintosh world are of necessity and design excluded. Apple uses SSD's specifically designed for it's new APFS filesystem. APFS can however only check the integrity of metadata of files "data" residing on non Apple hardware. To me this is of great concern making it doubtful whether, further down the line, I will actually adopt APFS on my "bread and butter" systems.

 

[vulgo]

Thanks will extract the APFS driver from the install image or HS USB installer, will then study the OP again as I seem to have missed something, and give it another try.
I am not too much in a hurry as I am only experimenting to gain some insight into this new filesystem. What bugs me is that the APFS design "tries" to ensure data integrity of native Apple SSD's only whereas the SSD's that are used in the Hackintosh world are of necessity and design excluded. Apple uses SSD's specifically designed for it's new APFS filesystem. APFS can however only check the integrity of metadata of files "data" residing on non Apple hardware. To me this is of great concern making it doubtful whether, further down the line, I will actually adopt APFS on my "bread and butter" systems.

All SSDs have error checking, some do more than others, Apple's seem to do the most with their own custom controllers, and now we know why i guess.

When High Sierra is released i will be on APFS SSD for the root volume + striped ZFS HDDs for data. A root filesystem backup to an HFS+ hard drive will be the only redundancy, for now.

 

[Henties]

All SSDs have error checking, some do more than others, Apple's seem to do the most with their own custom controllers, and now we know why i guess.
When High Sierra is released i will be on APFS SSD for the root volume + striped ZFS HDDs for data. A root filesystem backup to an HFS+ hard drive will be the only redundancy, for now.

Thanks for enlightening me. In the interim I have also reviewed my original hesitancy regarding the future use of APFS as presently there is no data on any of my boot SSD volumes. My own, Resilio sync based cloud, is a SATA 3 HDD, mounted on a folder called Galaxy on every machine in my "home directory" That takes care of my mail and all of my downloads, as well as a few other things that change often such as my Lightroom Catalogue". All other data, terabytes of it, that I have accumulated over the years, and which I do not dare to loose, is stored on 2 Ubuntu headless servers and accessible via NFS. On each server I run a Raid 5 array comprising 4 x SATA 3, 2 terabyte HDD's providing me 6 terabytes effective storage per server, 12 terabytes in total. All this is in turn backed up to HDD's which are stored off site. Off site storage I consider essential as a safeguard against theft and other catastrophes that may decide to visit me one day. All data is accessible on an on demand basis with the headless servers automatically falling asleep 5 mins. after the last macOs machine on my network has gone to sleep. That is one of the reasons why a well functioning sleep is so important to me. An Apple workstation, by waking, because of power nap and or me, force waking the workstation, will not wake my headless NAS severs. NAS wakeup is also on demand, either by trying to access some data on a server or me force waking the respective machine when needed. All that functionality is managed by a "control panel", one for each server, which I have written specifically for my specific needs and environment.
Considering all the foregoing I should not actually care too much about SSD data integrity at all since recovery is such a breeze, provided more than one properly working iHack is available on the network. NFS data activity is very fast on a gigabit network, at least fast enough for my needs. During NFS data transfers, read and write operations are split between 2 "disk" controllers and 2 "nics." one on each machine, that I believe contributes to the excellent throughput. I force NFS to use TCP as the underlying protocol, providing me also with data integrity during transfers, which is in addition to Ethernet's CRC checking. TCP data transfer integrity is built into a connection oriented protocol such as TCP, supplementing Ethernets CRC checking. Hoping I have not bored you too much with the foregoing.
Greets

 

[Henties]

All SSDs have error checking, some do more than others, Apple's seem to do the most with their own custom controllers, and now we know why i guess.

When High Sierra is released i will be on APFS SSD for the root volume + striped ZFS HDDs for data. A root filesystem backup to an HFS+ hard drive will be the only redundancy, for now.

Placed the APFS.efi driver into /EFI/Clover/drivers64UEFI and voila my system boots and everything is working. At least I now know the procedure that I have followed to convert the High Sierra on hfs+ upgrade to High Sierra on apfs actually works.
Greets

 

[vulgo]

Placed the APFS.efi driver into /EFI/Clover/drivers64UEFI and voila my system boots and everything is working. At least I now know the procedure that I have followed to convert the High Sierra on hfs+ upgrade to High Sierra on apfs actually works.
Greets

Glad it is working. Next question is, will it update to next the minor version without the helper partitions.

 

[Henties]

Glad it is working. Next question is, will it update to next the minor version without the helper partitions.

That is the $ 1000 question, guess one will have to wait and see. I don't particularly fancy these helper partitions myself. Will post a screen shot later as to what my partitioning scheme looks like now.

 

[Henties]

Glad it is working. Next question is, will it update to next the minor version without the helper partitions.

Currently downloading DB8 size is 3.01 gig. will take some time though. I think the helper partitions are generated by apfs.efi therefore if this update screws things up we should possibly be looking for a later release of that driver. Will let you know how this update affects things.

 

[Henties]

That is the $ 1000 question, guess one will have to wait and see. I don't particularly fancy these helper partitions myself. Will post a screen shot later as to what my partitioning scheme looks like now.

Attached my partition map before DB8 beta update

 

[vulgo]

Currently downloading DB8 size is 3.01 gig. will take some time though. I think the helper partitions are generated by apfs.efi therefore if this update screws things up we should possibly be looking for a later release of that driver. Will let you know how this update affects things.

Every update has come with an updated EFI driver. Mac firmware loads the latest version from the boot disk.

 

[Henties]

Every update has come with an updated EFI driver. Mac firmware loads the latest version from the boot disk.

This explains the update problems I seem to be having at the moment, trying to do an in place upgrade using the DB7 apfs.efi driver. Seems I will need to download the DB8 installer and extract the apfs.efi file from that and start again, or alternatively upgrade to a HFS+ partition and then there should be no problem.