When I go into Disk Utility in Recovery Mode, I see Macintosh HD, EFI, and Recovery HD under disk0 and another disk with a black globe icon called disk1 with Mac OS X Base System (with an orange disk icon) within disk1. When I put diskutil list into Terminal only disk0 appears, so I'm wondering what disk1 is, if it is needed, and how to delete it?
MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), Mid 2010 - Seagate 1TB SSHD installed
The entry with the orange icon is for an external drive that most likely is no longer connected. It also is separated from the other entries by a line. You need do nothing about it. Disk Utility has merely kept this entry from an installer that did not eject itself completely. You can select it and press the Delete key which should remove it.
But what is "Mac OS X Base System"? Also, Disk Utility does not let me delete it.
When I installed my Seagate 1TB SSHD Drive on my Mid 2010 Macbook Pro my laptop booted into Internet Recovery Mode. So I found my Snow Leopard install disk and installed 10.6.3 using that disk. Then I upgraded to 10.6.8 to access the App Store. I then downloaded and installed 10.10.1 from the App Store and then restored my system onto there. After running into issues, I did a clean install of 10.10.1 using the App Store and Migration Assistant, which solved my issues.
Perhaps disk1 is a remnant of Internet Recovery Mode?
Mac OS X Base System is the name of the installer disc image. What are you doing, exactly, to try removing it? Take a snapshot of the Disk Utility window and post it:
To post screen shot do this:
I cannot take a screenshot in Recovery Mode
That is a part of the small recovery partition (don't remove it or you can't boot into recovery mode) that get's mounted to run the limited OS X in order to make changes to your main disk and run the few utilities it knows about (Terminal, Disk Utility, Safari, Reinstall OS X, Restore from TM backup, Reset Password, Network Utility, etc). The phrase "OS X Base System" is what always appears for an OS X image that is contained in the contents of the recovery volume partition. You can see what is in this small file system if you manually try to mount the "Recovery" partition with something like
sudo mkdir /xxx (use anything you want that doesn't conflict with an existing folder name)
sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s3 /xxx
then look at the contents of the /xxx/com.apple.recovery.boot folder and see what that folder contains. There is a 450MB dmg file that gets mounted to form the "OS X Base System" that you see a file named BaseSystem.dmg -- You could even mount it to see what it contains if you want:
cd /xxx/com.apple.recovery.boot
hdiutil attach ./BaseSystem.dmg
Then you will see the same "Mac OS X Base System" mounted in the /Volumes folder
To unmount the "Mac OS X Base System" volume and clean up (the device associated with this image will vary so look and see what it is on your system using something like:
df -kt
whichever device is associated with the "/Volumes/Mac OS X Base System" mount point is the device to use in the "hdiutil detach" command below - on my system it was /dev/disk4s2:
cd /
hdiutil detach /dev/disk4s2
sudo umount /xxx
sudo rmdir /xxx
So, don't remove that mysterious partition - you will have big problems if you do.
Is it supposed to have a globe icon next to disk1?
All the disks and all the mounted or unmounted partitions always have an icon of some kind. So, I think the question might be rephrased "what do the different icons mean in Disk Utility". And the answer is, I don't know.
I tried to do a little googling of "disk utility icons" and haven't found anything that explains them yet.
Some of them are obvious I think (the internal disks look like an internal disk drives and the USB disks have the same USB icon that Finder shows for USB volumes -- here is a screenshot of a Disk Utility window in normal boot mode:
And here is a screenshot of a Disk Utility window in recovery mode:
As you can see, the only icon that is different is the one for the Recovery "disk", so not sure why that would be, as the DU app is the same in both the recovery mode partition and the normal OS X partition. Perhaps all recovery volumes have this "World" icon?
Hello dot.com... And sorry antable93 for hijacking your post, but this is the only thing I found that was close to what I am experiencing.
Have you seen this before? The fan keeps working and even though the disk says it has 54G available, in Finder it only has 22.1G. If I shut down and restart, the fan noise stops and then the disk capacity is back at 54G, although now, after it stopped spinning, it says 41G, and other now has 204.21G instead of 180.24G less than 2 hours ago. Earlier, all apps froze with a message that I had ran out of disk space, even though I had 54G and the apps were all light: Hyper 5, Chrome, and Preview. This has happened three times since last week.
Thank you so much! Any insight would be appreciated, and if I need to go to a Genius bar, then so be it. 🙂
Hidden Disks in Recovery HD's Disk Utility
