Created APFS volume is not found

[quatrezoneilles]

Error

Error: 

0: Install failure
   1: Error executing action
   2: Action `create_nix_volume` errored
   3: Failed to execute command with status 1 `"/usr/sbin/diskutil" "info" "/nix"`, stdout: Could not find disk: /nix

      stderr: 

Metadata

key	value
version	0.16.1
os	macos
arch	x86_64

First attempt at install, on 10.14.6 Mojave. It goes wrong here

        "kickstart_launchctl_service": {
          "action": {
            "domain": "system",
            "service": "org.nixos.darwin-store"
          },
          "state": "Completed"
        },
        "enable_ownership": {
          "action": {
            "path": "/nix"
          },
         "state": "Uncompleted"
        }

[Hoverbear]

Seems there may have been an undetected problem in the APFS volume creation, darn.

Did it create a /nix? Can you see a Nix store in your Disk Utility list?

[quatrezoneilles]

Yes to the first question

ls /nix/
nix-installer   receipt.json

No to the second one

[Hoverbear]

Do you see a volume named Nix Store in diskutil apfs list?

[quatrezoneilles]

No I don't.

It dawned to me that it could be that this mac was bought by my employer in 2015 and the disk was encrypted by a sysadmin who told me I didn't need the password (true until now). I opened my own account and renamed the original account something like employer-admin ... unfortunately I deleted this account a few months ago, thinking I no longer needed it. Stupid me.

So a solution (I hope) would be to use the recovery facilities and erase the disk and start anew. Due to my main driver being kaputt right now that old Mac is under much heavier use than it would normally be and I wouldn't do it right now.

Do you have an alternative suggestion?

I thought of Nix because Brew is becoming worse and worse on old machines. I suspect MacPorts is better, I have two macs that I use as music servers that are too old for brew to install on them but MacPorts runs fine (overall) on them. Still best would be Nix, I have NixOS on my two Linux boxes .. one of which just crapped out as I said earlier. I don't want to ever use another Linux distro.

Thanks a lot anyway

[Hoverbear]

Does the upstream install work for you maybe? https://nixos.org/download

[quatrezoneilles]

Looked at the docs two days ago, found I need a bit more time and preparation to do it. APFS is a complicated beast. Will try this weekend.

[Hoverbear]

I definitely agree with you that APFS is a complicated beast.

[quatrezoneilles]

It was easy to add an APFS volume using Disk Utility. I called is Nix Store. But the macos instructions on the manual https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/installation/installing-binary#macos-installation are completely opaque. I don't have an. /etc/synthetic.conf file, I don't know where to find it in the manpages... and my /etc/fstab is empty.. There's nothing about this either when I do ./nix-installer-etc help install

Awaiting further instructions, but we're progressing.

[Hoverbear]

If you're installing Nix manually (without this installer), you'd need to create both the synthetic.conf and fstab.