Disk volume structure

I recently installed Monterey directly over Catalina on a 2020 MBP. I have a weird (weird-to-me, anyway) volume structure and I don’t know if something’s wonky. So I made two different backups and reinstalled Monterey from the recovery disk. Same structure.

Is this normal? And if not, since a reinstall did not work, does that mean I’m headed to NukeAndPave land?

image

All help gratefully accepted!

Looks like you have 2 Macintosh HD - Data Volumes.
A “clean” install would give you
Media → Container → Volumes (Grayed out) System Volume, and Data Volume

Following your hierarchy, the bottom level (lowest in screen shot) is probably
from your restore via recovery disk. Due to the way APFS “links” (although
not exactly) you shouldn’t notice it in usage.

If on the other hand you are finding that INDEED your data is duplicated and
your disk is getting full, then you could delete it.

While of course you do what you are comfortable with, I would have nuked
and paved from Catalina (10.15) to Monterey (11). I always start fresh when
upgrading major revision levels.

Sorry, Monterey is V 12 (I can’t keep the names straight) :slight_smile:

So, I definitely would have started fresh.

If you click on each of the Data drives, what information do you see? (as in size, etc.)

I erased the drive and did a clean install of the OS. I still see two Data drives. This screenshot shows the “get info” for both of them — the one on the right is the data drive within the “Macintosh HD volumes” container, and the one on the left is the data drive that is lowest on the list in Disk Utility.

I wouldn’t fool around with making any additional changes until I spoke with Apple. And make sure you have at least two full backups of all your data before doing that.

Thanks. Yep, 2 full onsite backups (1 w chronosync and 1 w CCC) plus backblaze. Genius Bar wizard helped me erase all, and suggested I delete the second Data disk if it reappeared … so that’s what I did. Now reinstalling just the apps I actually use and selectively dragging over prefs from backup.

Sigh. And I thought I needed a hobby. :wink:

Anyway, so far, so good - survived a reboot and everything seems to be working. Will update if anything goes off.

Thanks!

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Hm.
Since you’ve already erased, nothing to lose (except time).

Erasing doesn’t change the partition scheme, so you could try booting into recovery, delete partitions on the drive, then create one APFS partition.

You won’t be needing that….

Hope everything goes well.

I tried going into recovery to delete partitions, and couldn’t figure out how to delete the one without the data. That’s when I went to the Genius Bar. :slight_smile:

Thanks! So far, so good.

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There is one mounted at /Systems/Volumes/Data
and one mounted at /Volumes/Macintosh HD-Data

The one at /Volumes/Macintosh HD-Data can go.

Also, how did you erase the drive? In this case you
would have to boot into the recovery partition and use
the Disk Utility there. Ensuring that you Show All Devices
and select the PHYSICAL disk to erase, not the Container
or Volumes (They will be erased when the physical drive
is erased)

Sounds like you are back up and running, looks like the
Genius bar was worth the trip. :slight_smile:

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Yes, that is the one I deleted.

And yes, I went into recovery mode to select the physical disk to erase. (Well, the Genius did.) Definitely worth the trip! And the reinstall has gone surprisingly easily :smiley:

Thanks again for all your help!

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