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Restore macOS factory settings for FusionDrive (diskutil list shows more than a dozen disks with little space)

Hello Community,

Ok, I am probably not the guy that should extensively use the terminal. But I managed to create a fusion drive with a bootcamp partition when I bought the iMac that worked very well. Now I want to sell my iMac and have deleted/formatted the disks to erase any data, and to reinstall macOS. I have also successfully merged the disks. Now, when I enter diskutil list, I get disk0 to disk16.

  • Disk0 is the OS X base system.
  • Disk2 through Disk13 are disks with variable but very small sizes (524KB to 6.3MB).
  • Disk14 is 121GB physical (I assume the SSD part of the FusionDrive).
  • Disk15 is 2TB physical (I assume the normal disk part of the FusionDrive).
  • Disk16 is 2.1TB virtual disk

(See screenshot below)

Also, after successfully installing macOS, I can boot in macOS but do not see any hard disks (no user folder, i.e. no Documents, etc.). Now, I would like to reset everything to factory settings so that the buyer gets a fresh clean start. My questions:

  • what are all these small disks? Can they be deleted? If so how they can be deleted?
  • can I these small disks be merged to the FusionDrive?
  • can the disks be renamed from disk0 to disk2?


Basically I want to restore the factory settings of the disk setup and reinstall macOS. I definitely do not know how to do this, even after searching the whole web! Therefore, any inputs would be very much appreciated. Thanks a bunch!

Cheers, stefan


iMac 27", macOS 10.15

Posted on Dec 8, 2019 2:25 AM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Dec 8, 2019 12:27 PM

No it is not. Click on the small View box in the upper left hand corner of Disk Utility and select View All. Then select the main drive instead of the first indented volume and reformat the whole drive back to 1 volume.


Use the same instructions as "How to change the partition map (scheme) of a disk"

in the > How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support article.


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5 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Dec 8, 2019 12:27 PM in response to Disillusional

No it is not. Click on the small View box in the upper left hand corner of Disk Utility and select View All. Then select the main drive instead of the first indented volume and reformat the whole drive back to 1 volume.


Use the same instructions as "How to change the partition map (scheme) of a disk"

in the > How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support article.


Restore macOS factory settings for FusionDrive (diskutil list shows more than a dozen disks with little space)

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