Catalina 10.5.2, double hard disks? what?!

[Solomani]

I jumped on the Catalina bandwagon with Catalina 10.5.2 (this was a fresh clean install, following a disk wipe of Mojave). Been on it for a few days, so far Apple Music is terrible and glitched, lost all my album artwork, and then a synch with my iPhone duplicated all my iTunes songs. It will take me days to find and eradicate the hundreds and hundreds of duplicate songs. Stupid Apple.

Then today I opened the Disk Utility, and I see that it shows "two" Macintosh HDs? Say what?? Can someone explain this to me? Or if Apple posted a FAQ on this somewhere, can you please direct me to that documentation? I personally would not know since I never do the Beta versions, and I never do the Developer releases either.

I have an iMac 2017 (4K iMac quad-core i7). It has a single hard drive (which is a 500GB Flash). Why is the Disk Utility showing 2 hard disks? I never partition, by the way. I never needed to. And partitioning a small 500GB drive would be stupid anyways, it's not a very big drive to begin with.

 

[iMacDragon]

Data is the user data partition, non data is the OS read only partition, both are 'virtual' apfs volumes sharing same space. This has been gone over countless times in the forums.

Apple support doc on the subject: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

 

[Solomani]

Thanks for the doc link.

Since I'm a recent Catalina adopter (never did any of the earliest versions or betas), do you know if this 2-volume system (one is read only, I realize that now) is responsible for the ummm.... for the fact that my iPhone (when trying to AirDrop files to my Mac) is seeing doubles, the AirDrop window sees:

"Jim's iMac"
"Jim's iMac"

It never did that before in Mojave.

 

[iMacDragon]

I think that's just some bug in Catalina.. seen it reported at least once elsewhere in forum, but reason it occurred was not established to recollection. I seem to recall changing machine name made it only appear once again, but returned to double if returned to original name. So it's probably some kind of weird cacheing bug.

 

[chfilm]

This is really insane. They shouldve hidden this somehow, it's so damn confusing when trying to wipe the disk and perform a fresh install. Absolutely unclear to the end user what is going on there.

 

[posguy99]

This is really insane. They shouldve hidden this somehow, it's so damn confusing when trying to wipe the disk and perform a fresh install. Absolutely unclear to the end user what is going on there.

What am I missing? Nuke partitions, reinstall, restore data. How is it confusing?