How do delete a logical volume group?

Yesterday I installed a 4TB drive in my early 2008 Mac Pro running Mavericks.  However, when I tried to format it, Disk Utility created a logical volume group for it.  I now can’t delete the logical volume group, or even rename it.

A bit of googling showed that this is apparently a bug in Mavericks, Mountain Lion, or maybe earlier; Disk Utility creates a logical volume group for any internal hard drive > 3TB.  The two fixes I found were to format the drive in an external caddy before installing it in the machine (not practical, since I don’t have an external caddy), or to boot the standalone Snow Leopard installer and use it to format the drive.  I might be able to find this, but I’m not betting on it at the moment.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for dealing with this? Or, is there any advantage to just leaving the drive in a logical volume group? If I’m going to keep the logical volume group, I”d at least like to rename it.  I just called it “new” when I formatted the drive, because I was going to copy a smaller drive to it, and give it the name of the original drive.


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On 20 Jun 2014, at 17:59 , Rodney <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Yesterday I installed a 4TB drive in my early 2008 Mac Pro running Mavericks.  However, when I tried to format it, Disk Utility created a logical volume group for it.  I now can’t delete the logical volume group, or even rename it.

You will need to use the command-line I believe as I do not know of a GUI utility to do this.

You need to use diskutil with a command something like:

diskutil cs list
diskutil cs delete <UUID from list command>

Once you’ve done that, you should be able to use diskutil to format the drive (not Disk Utility.app)

diskutil reformat /dev/disk#

Check the man page and double check all this.

> Does anyone else have any suggestions for dealing with this? Or, is there any advantage to just leaving the drive in a logical volume group? If I’m going to keep the logical volume group, I”d at least like to rename it.  I just called it “new” when I formatted the drive, because I was going to copy a smaller drive to it, and give it the name of the original drive.

I don’t know why you can’t rename it though. I can rename my core storage logical volume (Fusion drive) without a problem.

--
Knowledge, information, power, words... flying through the air,
invisible... And suddenly the world was tap-dancing on quicksand. In
that case, the prize went to the best dancer. --The Fifth Elephant




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On Jun 22, 2014, at 03:12, LuKreme <[hidden email]> wrote:

> You will need to use the command-line I believe as I do not know of a GUI utility to do this.

Thanks.  This is a big improvement on the two options I previously knew about...

> You need to use diskutil with a command something like:
>
> diskutil cs list
> diskutil cs delete <UUID from list command>

That worked.  I used the UUID of the logical volume group.

> Once you’ve done that, you should be able to use diskutil to format the drive (not Disk Utility.app)
>
> diskutil reformat /dev/disk#

After deleting the logical volume group, I was left with a physical volume with one untitled HFS+ partition on it.  Since my goal is just to clone a smaller drive onto the bigger one.  I didn't reformat.  I'm just using Disk Utility's Restore to copy the old volume to the new one.  It seems to be working.  I'll know in another 7 hours or so...

> I don’t know why you can’t rename it though. I can rename my core storage logical volume (Fusion drive) without a problem.

"Pilot error" maybe? I couldn't find a way to do it, but I didn't try the command line interface.

Anyhow, thanks for the help.




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