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co1indarby Author

Level 1

30 points

Downgraded to Mojave from Catalina - now have Data drive?

I've recently bought an refurbished Mac and it came with a fresh install of Catalina.

I need Mojave so I straight away booted into recovery and restored my Mojave TM backup, and all went well.

But now I have a drive called "Macintosh HD-Data" drive on my desktop.

It's only got 6gb on it (the other drive has 500gb).

It's not causing any issues but I want to get rid of it.

I've looked online about nuking the drive and reinstalling Mojave and the restoring the TM backup.

I don't really want to do that, so if the drive doesn't contain anything I need (i've looked at it and there's no apps on it) can I:

• Eject it from the desktop every time I restart - I very rarely restart so it would be gone most of the time

• or delete it using Disk Utility

• or is the only alternative booting in recovery, erasing the entire drive so it removes the container and then reinstalling Mojave and then installing my TM back up, which is a huge pain to do.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Aug 29, 2020 5:23 AM

Top-ranking reply

rcosta887

Level 4

3,604 points

Posted on Aug 29, 2020 7:22 AM

Trying to deal with Core Storage, APFS volumes, and APFS containers is a pain in the butt. The nuclear option in that case is the way to go. Even as a tech person I would never do this on a live system.

However, I think it's way easier than you think with your TM backup:

Update your TM backup of Mojave.
Option boot on power on, select the TM drive recovery
Disk Utility > View - Show All Devices > Click Apple SSD > Erase
Quit Disk Utility > Restore from Time Machine
Profit.

In other words, by Option-booting off the Time Machine drive itself I'm pretty sure you don't have to upgrade, downgrade, or sidegrade from Catalina or Mountain Lion (or whatever it gives you)->then to El Capitan->then to Mojave. (I'm assuming that's the pain you're referring to, because that would be a pain)

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Downgraded to Mojave from Catalina - now have Data drive?

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