I’m reinstalling the os on my old MacBook before giving it to my wife. In Disk Utility, there Macintosh HD, but then there’s also something called Macintosh HD – Data. Which drive do I select to erase?
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Cameron
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How Do I Know Which Drive To Erase?
Comments: 7 Responses to “How Do I Know Which Drive To Erase?”
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Those are two volumes on the same drive. Catalina puts the System on a read-only volume, and everything else on a separate volume. That's why you see two volumes.
If you want to erase the drive, you need to view the drives. Click on the View button and select Show All Devices. Then you'll see the drive and the volumes under that. You can then select the drive and erase it.
I’m just not sure which drive to select
Cameron: There is only ONE drive. Did you change your View to show "Show All Devices?" If so, then you'll see there is only one drive and both of those volumes are on that same drive.
Ok, yes, I see that. I was just confused, because in episode #1286 you appear to choose the Macintosh HD volume under APPLE SSID and erase that. It was the only thing in your dropdown menu, so when I had two things in my list, it threw me off.
Cameron: Right. Episode #1286 was from 2016. Catalina is new in 2019 and changed how the drive is formatted. Disk Utility changed too.
Dear Gary,
I'd like to reinstall Mavericks. In the Disk utility, I have to choose between erasing APPLE SSID, underneath it's written untitled, then there is some horizontal bar, there is an icon written disk1, and underneath a fourth one written OSX base system
Regards
Bert
Bert: Not sure what you are looking at there. Did you click on the View button and select Show All Devices? Do you have more than one hard drive? Maybe some externals? Do you mean SSID? Or SSD?