which disk to erase in Catalina for fresh reinstall

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which disk to erase in Catalina for fresh reinstall

Having tried recovery and failed (due to lack of knowledge and finding more discs/volumes). In fact tried 2 times using cmd-R first time selecting Mac HD and second time selecting Mac HD Data. All got very confusing and nothing appeared to help speed up the system. I was advised to do this by apple help engineer on line. He said my Mac should be whizzing through al the programmes and applications and felt that a fresh install would clear the problem. I have not needed up with this..... so confused - don't know which disc to erase, recover or anything.. expert help required please! I guess what I need to know is what discs to erase and which one to install on.

Posted on Aug 10, 2020 1:58 PM

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Answer 1

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Tesserax

Level 10

152,236 points

Aug 10, 2020 4:03 PM in response to Stressed Mum

I doubt seriously that using Time Machine caused the additional volumes, but of course, anything can be possible.

At this point, I think you have two choices:

Try to remove/delete the unwanted volumes, or
Completely erase your system drive, and then, install a "clean" copy of macOS Catalina. You can then use Migration Assistant to restore your apps and data.

Which would you prefer to do?

Ref: How to reinstall macOS from macOS Recovery - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

152,236 points

Aug 11, 2020 7:26 AM in response to Stressed Mum

The following article provides the steps necessary to fully erase your Mac's drive:

How to erase a disk for Mac - Apple Support

After you erase the drive, you would re-enter into Recovery Mode, but this time, choose the "Reinstall macOS" option.

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

152,236 points

Aug 10, 2020 2:08 PM in response to Stressed Mum

Normally you would see the internal drive with a single container that has two volumes in it: Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD - Data.

In your case, the drive is named: APPLE HDD ...; the container: Container disk 1, and as you can see, it has four volumes where it should have only the two I mentioned. The volumes, starting with "2" were added somehow.

The key for the next steps is do you have an existing recent backup as we may need to completely erase the drive to get things working properly again?

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Answer 4

Stressed Mum Author

Level 1

17 points

Aug 10, 2020 2:20 PM in response to Tesserax

I have all my document in cloud, my pictures too, but also on external hard drive I keep the photos app. Music app is also on external drive Email is always a problem to keep files but I think I have them on the external harddrive, all apps can be redownloaded so yes I think I m ok and apple told me time machines is perfect for this but are worried that there may be an issue somewhere amongst the time machine that has caused this issue to start with!

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