My Mac mini has two internal disks – a 256 GB SSD and a 500 GB hard drive. High Sierra was installed on the SSD. When I enter "diskutil list" in Terminal, it looks like the Recovery partition is on the non-startup 500 GB drive? Could somebody please confirm this (I wonder and can't believe it is not on the startup drive)? And maybe you can also say what the "synthesized" part means?
Mac mini, macOS High Sierra (10.13), Late 2012, MacMini6,1
Still puzzled. I installed the SSD. Then I booted into OSX Lion from the HDD (named diskTWO). From there I installed High Sierra on the SSD (named diskONE). After that I booted into High Sierra from the new SSD. Then I erased the HDD (3-pass secure erase) and I am using it as a data-only drive.
APFS does not have a Recovery HD but one is installed on another drive if available.
Hm. When typing "diskutil apfs list" in Terminal there is actually an "APFS Volume Disk (Role): disk2s3 (Recovery)".
I feel like stepping into somebody's face at the Apple Store. This is a ridiculous situation. I want to ******* know why this has to be so complicated.
This may be a drive that was once formatted HFS+ with macOS installed along with a Recovery HD. When installing High Sierra the main volume, DiskONE, was changed to APFS which did not erase the Recovery HD. APFS does not have a Recovery HD but one is installed on another drive if available. I think this is what you are seeing. Don't worry about it.
APFS does not have a Recovery HD but one is installed on another drive if available.
This statement is wrong. Both disks contain a recovery partition. The one on the APFS disk (disk2s3) is not visible in the Startup Manager, but can be booted from with Command-R at startup. The one on the HFS disk (disk1s3) is visible in the Startup Manager and is a Mountain Lion version of macOS Recovery. It remained (to my utter surprise) during disk erasure maybe because I selected the volume and not the disk before clicking Erase in Disk Utility.
The Terminal command to remove the superfluous recovery partition in this case:
diskutil mergePartitions JHFS+ “diskTWO” disk1s2 disk1s3To answer my own question, the "synthesized" part shows which volumes are contained in the APFS container. The reason there are three groupings for two disks is likely because the identifiers can only represent two levels (disk and partition), while the APFS container introduces a third level.
Also ridiculous: that you can mark your own reply as "Solved" (which I did by mistake) and can not undo it. There are way too many flaws Apple's world.
Recovery partition got installed on non-startup drive?