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Weird small partitions and restoring a hard drive to default factory settings

Hi, community.


I want to restore my Apple Mac Mini Late 2012 solid state embedded hard drive to its default factory settings through Terminal so I can do a clean install from a Mojave bootable USB. Yet these weird small partitions keep showing up. I have my bootable USB ready and working yet I don't have any idea why it shows these 12 disks. Any advice?


-bash-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *251.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *1.2 GB     disk1
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         30.7 KB    disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Mac OS X Base System    1.2 GB     disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk2
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk3
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk4
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk5
/dev/disk6
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk6
/dev/disk7
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *6.3 MB     disk7
/dev/disk8
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *2.1 MB     disk8
/dev/disk9
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *1.0 MB     disk9
/dev/disk10
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk10
/dev/disk11
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *524.3 KB   disk11
/dev/disk12
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                            untitled               *1.0 MB     disk12


Thank you so much.

Mac mini, macOS 10.14

Posted on May 26, 2021 4:54 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on May 27, 2021 9:19 AM

Those other volumes are just virtual volumes created and used by the macOS installer. Just ignore them.


All that matters when performing a clean install is to use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical drive which looks like you have already done. FYI, beginning with macOS 10.13 Disk Utility unfortunately hides the physical drives from view by default so no users must click "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.

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Question marked as Best reply

May 27, 2021 9:19 AM in response to juanfernandobaenaramirez

Those other volumes are just virtual volumes created and used by the macOS installer. Just ignore them.


All that matters when performing a clean install is to use Disk Utility to erase the whole physical drive which looks like you have already done. FYI, beginning with macOS 10.13 Disk Utility unfortunately hides the physical drives from view by default so no users must click "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" before the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility.

Weird small partitions and restoring a hard drive to default factory settings

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