How do I partition the drive?

Again - I figured out the question in my OP. (I wrote yesterday, “Managed to get into Disk Utility.” The reason for my confusion was that after I clicked on options, I (incorrectly) thought I was in a loop because I was again at language choice.) I did NOT have to set it up first.

I’ve no choice but to run Big Sur on this M1.

I nondestructively repartitioned it back to two partitions (visible / not counting the tiny ones) and it seems to be OK. 10.15 won’t run on Apple silicon and I guess I can try 11.1 Beta, both on the main APFS partition, and have the other one for toying with other OSes that DO run on the M1, or whatever.

HWTech- I had roughly the same experience. “You must try it multiple times to accomplish the task.” but even after several tries (w/Catalina) the best I could get was the 6 partitions I wanted, but even then, never would everything check out as healthy in First Aid.

Appreciate all the discussion. 🖖

LOL. That article advises me to “press and hold the Option key during startup.”

M1; that won’t work.

Managed to get into Disk Utility and it appears willing to try: I had a feeling it wouldn’t work.

APFS won’t support 6 partitions. Even on Apple hardware.

FAIL:

I had had trouble doing this with an external 6TB WD (Western Digital) hard drive and Apple blamed WD.

Before repartitioning, I had run First Aid (fdisk) and a diagnostic and everything had checked out clean.

This is a brand new machine.

I don’t think it’s a hardware problem; I think it’s a macOS bug

Wow! My M1 has a 82+330+82+247+247GB of space! That adds up to 1TB! Has Apple revived on-the-fly disk compression? Did apple give me a free upgrade to 1 TB? No. This is a 512 GB drive. “APPLE SSD AP0512Q Media”

Disk utility/macOS botched that Royally! (Even more than I anticipated... even more Royally than the British Royal family!!!)

That would explain it! Annoyingly a senior Apple advisor apparently didn’t know that when I was seeking help, as U was having many problems formatting the western digital drive into 6 1TB partitions.

Thanks!

I hear you.

Is this 2-partition absurdity documented anywhere? Can't find it - https://www.google.com/search?q=Big+Sur+does+not+allow+more+than+2+partitions

(Wondering what to do with my 6-partition 6TB drive.)

It is super odd that Disk Utility was willing to try to create a 6-partition drive, and did create some Frankenstein Monster with 8 (overlapping!?) partitions. (6 big ones, including two named "Four" and two named "Three"! + the 2 tiny ones) I should have dumped the messed up partition table before reformatting, just to see what it looked like.

Aside: If anyone finds a way to produce a healthy external GUID-format drive with several APFS partitions, I would like to hear about it. Whether created from Catalina or Big Sur or whatever. Absurd situation. Feeling drawn to explore relying more on other OSes. I’ll only have this M1 for a few months. Not sure I’ll be replacing it with more Apple silicon after I hand it off. Hopefully things get better after this lousy initial experience. I do appreciate the work and techniques Apple is using to allow tough and optional hardening of the system and MDM...

Wonder how many macOS 11 Server installs are out there, given flaws like these...

I haven't, at least from M1.

Cool. Let's keep this thread alive. After Apple promised/hinted at moving to ZFS but delivered APFS with bugs like this still in it years later, my expectations from the macOS team are low.

Thanks for the reminder/warning.