Core Storage & Deep Freeze Mac

    Core Storage was a volume manager added to the operating system as of macOX 10.7 (Lion) that remained in use in the operating system until 10.14 (High Sierra) when Apple completed the transition to APFS as the file system of choice for macOS. This storage manager was used to facilitate the provisioning of features like Fusion Drives and to support File Vault full disk encryption in macOS until the transition to APFS completed. 

    Deep Freeze & Core Storage

    Versions of Deep Freeze that support installation on a HFS+ volume do not support installation on a Core Storage Volume due to Core Storage obfuscating the physical disks that the operating system resides on. 

    As Core Storage was deprecated when Apple transitioned to using APFS, and the current versions of Deep Freeze Mac support APFS without issue there are no plans to address this issue in a future release of Deep Freeze Mac. 

    Customers who still have systems impacted by this issue can, if possible, upgrade to a version of macOS that makes use of APFS and is fully supported, or they can disable Core Storage.  Disabling Core Storage will prevent the use of the Fusion Drive functionality built into those versions of macOS, will prevent the use of File Vault to encrypt the disk, and may cause problems with Dual Boot configurations on Intel based systems where the boot disk is larger than 3tb in size. 

    Identifying a Core Storage Volume.

    Running the command below from a terminal as an administrator will allow you to determine if Core Storage is enabled; 

    diskutil cs list

    The command will return the response No CoreStorage logical volume groups found when run on a system running APFS or that does not have Core Storage Enabled, any other response will include a number of details about the existing configuration of the system, including a line that indicates if the Core Storage Volume can be reverted. If you see the following;

    Revertible:   Yes (no decryption required)

    This indicates that the volume can be reverted by running the command below;

    diskutil cs revert / 

    Any other value indicates that the system cannot be reverted and will require the destruction of the Core Storage Volume to allow the installation of Deep Freeze on the device. 
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