How to remove a non-connected Hard Drive from my MacBook Pro?

my macbook pro is seeing a hard drive that is not connected but you still see it on the utilities app how do i remove that if i try erase but then it still thinks the drive is connected i think i may have not ejected the drive properly but now i am stuck


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MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Sep 24, 2024 5:37 AM

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5 replies

Sep 24, 2024 9:22 AM in response to lam2988

If it is still there, what is the NAME of this ghost drive?


Certain disk image files appear as if they are drives, because they are treated just like drives. They are actually a drive-inside-a-file, possibly compressed or encoded.


The disk image file named 'MacOS Base System' is the name for the minimal MacOS. it is used by Recovery, and it is pulled form your Mac's Read-Only Memory, expanded, and mounted as if it were a physical drive. Then it is used for Recovery functions. Another place MacOS Base system appears is inside an Installer image.

Sep 25, 2024 8:10 AM in response to lam2988

Disk Utility shows an "outline" View. Items indented from the left margin are components of the physical device at the top of each Physical Device group.


Container disks are an abstraction introduced with Apple File system. Their purpose is to be opaque to older MacOS so that older versions don't try to 'fix' things inside APFS structures, which are very different from older MacOS File System.


As APFS has evolved, additional data structures have been added. The screenshot below shows disk Utility entry for ONE physical device, "Apple SSD..." and typical containers and volumes as of Ventura.


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How to remove a non-connected Hard Drive from my MacBook Pro?

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