M1 Sonoma 14.6 - how do I diskutil back into my mac please help! (Startup disk gone)

oatstraws wrote:

• hi osx community!~~ so I'd just like to know how royally I screwed up here.

=2021 Macbook Air m1 13inch

No startupdisk available, just empty

• (APPLE SSD AP0256Q Media)- 250 GB data available- totally empty- partitioned into 3 container disks + 2 APFS volumes, 150, 50, 50, GB respectively (I partitioned this in a dreadful haste, trying to delete my data)

• "Apple disk image media," underneath stands remaining -along w/ container disk that appears to carry a macOS Base System volume. (~2gb)

• no preboot or recovery images in sight.

I don't know what to do & am not skilled enough in bash so i'm just head banging around man pages not wanting to do anything more to further harm this computer though I fear it might be a bit irreparable at this point. I will accepts all groans & jeers.

For those that would like context:

I panicked when I found a bit of adware on my system & ended up booting my mac into recovery mode, where I was looking at the recovery logs, & admittedly irrational, decided to use terminal to security delete my keychains - now, I don't know why but the partition schemes and disks are messy and have always been, I noticed it way back, but didn't do anything because everything worked fine & this was refurbished and then secondhand on top of that so... Here we are,

Thank you so much to anyone at all if you take the time to read, hopefully you can find it in you to help guide me towards shore!

on M series Mac—hold the power button down to access the Options boot screen.

The Options icon will take you to Recovery Mode which automatically launchs the macOS installer. Quit the installer, now from the Utilities screen> run Disk Utility First Aid, or select "Reinstall macOS".

it is all here in the How to repair a Mac disk with Disk Utility

How to repair a Mac disk with Disk Utility - Apple Support