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- Feb 28, 2011
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- GA-H170M-D3H
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Currently, there is no direct way to install High Sierra on a newly created Fusion Drive. Basically, the installer forgets to create the Recovery Partition on the HDD of the Fusion Drive, rendering the system unable to boot after copying the installation files to disk. Clover comes up empty, with only the thumb drive with the High Sierra installer available if you didn't disconnect it.
Several people seemed to have worked around this by installing High Sierra to a hard drive and later restoring that installation to their Fusion Drive. I wasn't able to find any documentation, so I decided to write up my way. This workaround does not require Carbon Copy Cloner.
Requirements
You will need a solid understanding of macOS on generic Intel machines. If you're a hackintosh newbie and you really want a Fusion Drive, go ahead and read one of the many tutorials on how to create one and install Sierra. This writeup is intended for advanced users only. I'll be happy to answer specific questions, but I will not tell you where to click and what keys to press
Note that I tried this step from the High Sierra installer, which didn't work. I ended up without a recovery partition. But I probably had other stuff not sorted out at this step, so maybe this does work from within the High Sierra installer after all.
Several people seemed to have worked around this by installing High Sierra to a hard drive and later restoring that installation to their Fusion Drive. I wasn't able to find any documentation, so I decided to write up my way. This workaround does not require Carbon Copy Cloner.
Requirements
You will need a solid understanding of macOS on generic Intel machines. If you're a hackintosh newbie and you really want a Fusion Drive, go ahead and read one of the many tutorials on how to create one and install Sierra. This writeup is intended for advanced users only. I'll be happy to answer specific questions, but I will not tell you where to click and what keys to press
- Working High Sierra *and* Sierra installers on thumb drives. No special setup required, just install Clover and insert your kexts/dsdts/config.plist/smbios...
- One hard disk and one solid state drive to build your Fusion Drive from
- One (external) hard disk or any other means of storing a Time Machine backup (I used my Time Capsule compatible NAS). If you use a NAS, make sure that you can restore from it while inside the recovery system! If macOS lists your NAS as a Time Capsule style network backup drive without any tricks, you should be fine.
- Connect the hard disk to your computer. Disconnect the SSD to avoid confusion
- Boot the High Sierra installer and install to the HDD as you would normally. Don't use the SSD for this step, as you will end up with an APFS partition instead of HFS+
- After the installation is complete, boot from the HDD using Clover on your thumb drive
- Install the Supplemental Update if you like
- After installation and updating is complete, create a Time Machine backup on your (internal/external/NAS) Time Machine drive
Note that I tried this step from the High Sierra installer, which didn't work. I ended up without a recovery partition. But I probably had other stuff not sorted out at this step, so maybe this does work from within the High Sierra installer after all.
- Connect your SSD in addition to the HDD you installed High Sierra on
- Boot your Sierra installer thumb drive.
- Open Terminal
- Run diskutil list and figure out which device node is which drive. Since your SSD and HDD should be the only connected drives, I assume your disks are disk0 and disk1.
- Run diskutil cs create "Fusion Drive" disk0 disk1
- Run diskutil cs createVolume "Fusion Drive" jhfs+ "Macintosh HD" 100%
- Exit Terminal
- Restore from your Time Machine backup to the newly created volume "Macintosh HD" on your Fusion Drive
- If you like, take a peek at the installation logs while restoring. You should notice a bunch of messages concerned with creating the Recovery HD on the CoreStorage volume and restoring it's contents from the "Recovery Set" on your TM drive.