I have an apparently orphaned APFS container on an external hard disk which is showing as uninitialised as shown in the screenshot below.
Is there a way of fixing this? - first aid cannot run, cannot mount the drive in either the orphaned state or the original container. I'm not too worried about losing the contents of the container, but I want to be able to use it again
MacBook Pro Retina
Well I never - I had to close down the machine to go to a meeting and all the drives where ejected.
I just tried to erase the APFS partition and this time it worked. So I've not lost the Time Machine partition and I can now access the rest of the drive and use it!
Happy days - but it would be useful to understand what caused the problem in the first place! Too late for RCA now though!
Yes and now it's vanished from the Disk Utility view. Here's the terminal view.
I think the only option now is to reformat the entire drive. Hopefully that'll work. I have another Time Machine disk so all is not lost
To be honest I don't know what happens when you try and create a APFS partition on a HFS+ formatted drive. It's not something I've done or even occurred to me to try. If I get some time I can test it. In the meantime perhaps someone will have an idea.
Well, something is clearly wrong with how the drive is partitioned. I formatted an external drive as MacOS Extended (Journaled) then added a APFS partition which should have a Container disk which yours doesn't have.
I can't tell you how to fix it.
Of course you are absolutely right, but I don’t have that luxury - just moved abroad for the rest of the year and limited to what I could bring, so some compromises were necessary. I have one dedicated TM drive and the drive with the issue had to be shared. I didn’t like the idea of only relying on a single TM drive.
Did you try running First Aid on the top level of the Seagate drive?
Yes - but it ran fine. And the TimeMachine partition is working OK also so the disk is not fatally corrupted, just the APFS partition is showing a problem.
This is the result of running first aid on the APFS partition
It used to! That seems to be the issue. There was a container with 4 APFS volumes - and now there are none!
FWIW, you should use a dedicated drive for Time Machine if for no other reason than if the drive fails, you lose not only your backups but any other data you saved to it.
Have you tried Erasing the volume or deleting the Container?
Please provide a screenshot from Terminal (diskutil list). Let's try to see what disk2s2 is.
Orphaned APFS container
