format disk with APFS, the new apple file system?

Question

Has anyone managed to format an actual real disk with the new apple filesystem APFS in Mac OS Sierra ?

the documentation explains how to make a disk image with APFS:

hdiutil create -fs APFS -size 1GB foo.sparseimage

However, when trying to restore this image to a real disk with either 'Disk Utility' (GUI) or 'asr' (CLI), I get a "is not valid for restoring" error.

I've created several different disk images in different formats (-format flag to hdiutil) in the hopes of creating a disk image that could be used for restoring to a real disk, but the error always stayed the same.

Did anyone managed to get APFS on a real disk?

Solution

Try the following:

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 1 GPT APFS TEST R

diskutil list

should give:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:           GUID_partition_scheme                    *480.1 GB   disk2
   1:                         EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                      Apple_APFS                     479.9 GB   disk2s2

/dev/disk2s2s1 (external, virtual):

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                APFS Volume TEST                   +24.6 KB    disk2s2s1

Comments

[Overmind]

What is the error number of the error (250-261)?

[Nick Woodhams]

Only issue is that Apple is not making it bootable until sometime in 2017. "A Developer Preview of Apple File System is available in macOS Sierra. Apple plans to release Apple File System as a bootable file system in 2017."