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Dual boot Mojave-Catalina set up to try out Catalina. Now want to remove Mojave OS

I was running Mojave, but before installing Catalina I set up a dual boot to check that everything worked with Catalina. I'm not a tech expert so I was surprised how easy it was to create a new volume and install Catalina into it. I'm now content that Catalina works for me and runs the apps I was interested in so I now want to make the change completely.


But how do I now move to Catalina? I can find advice online how to set up a dual boot, but not on how, having done so, I can move to a single OS, in this case Catalina. I am looking for advice please


In System Preferences - Startup Disk are now shown two systems: "Catalina macOS 10.15.7" and "Macintosh HD macOS 10.14.6" (which contains the Mojave OS). I suspect simply deleting the "Mojave" Folder on my disk may cause problems, possibly serious ones.


I thought about using Disk Utility to delete both of the "Catalina" and "Catalina Data" volumes so I am left only with "Macintosh HD macOS 10.14.6" (i.e. the Mojave OS). Once deleted I would again install Catalina. Would this work? I want to keep things as simple as possible


If I can work this out then I will probably adopt the same approach for Big Sur in due course.


Hope someone can help.

iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 16, 2020 8:41 AM

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Posted on Nov 17, 2020 9:45 PM

You should be able to just select and delete the Mojave APFS volume (or old-style partition). Or (erase it and) install Big Sur on it for testing. Or erase the whole device (not just the volumes under it) and make a clean install from scratch.


But make good backups before doing any of those. And I'd make sure to have another external disk that I can Option-boot from, just in case something goes totally wrong (there is Internet recovery but it is slow).

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Nov 17, 2020 9:45 PM in response to Crackerjack2012

You should be able to just select and delete the Mojave APFS volume (or old-style partition). Or (erase it and) install Big Sur on it for testing. Or erase the whole device (not just the volumes under it) and make a clean install from scratch.


But make good backups before doing any of those. And I'd make sure to have another external disk that I can Option-boot from, just in case something goes totally wrong (there is Internet recovery but it is slow).

Dual boot Mojave-Catalina set up to try out Catalina. Now want to remove Mojave OS

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