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I'm trying to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur. When I get to the “which hard drive to install” question I select “Macintosh HD” but I get an error saying “This volume is not formatted as APFS”. What the heck does that mean?

I'm trying to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur. When I get to the “which hard drive to install” question I select “Macintosh HD” but I get an error saying “This volume is not formatted as APFS”. What the heck does that mean?

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 29, 2021 6:18 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 29, 2021 7:00 AM

It means you were running Mojave on a System File System of HFS Journaled. Catalina and Big Sur can only be installed on the new APFS ( Apple File System ) formatted drives.


One can do the Time Machine Backup ( Mojave ) before going the Big Sur route and Wipe the Internal Drive and re-Format as APFS with the GUID Partition Map - install Big Sur and use Migration Assist during the initial Setup of Big Sur.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 29, 2021 7:00 AM in response to JBC-help

It means you were running Mojave on a System File System of HFS Journaled. Catalina and Big Sur can only be installed on the new APFS ( Apple File System ) formatted drives.


One can do the Time Machine Backup ( Mojave ) before going the Big Sur route and Wipe the Internal Drive and re-Format as APFS with the GUID Partition Map - install Big Sur and use Migration Assist during the initial Setup of Big Sur.

I'm trying to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur. When I get to the “which hard drive to install” question I select “Macintosh HD” but I get an error saying “This volume is not formatted as APFS”. What the heck does that mean?

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