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haralds

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 3, 2014
3,048
1,286
Silicon Valley, CA
I have a couple of disks that contained operating systems, which were deleted. Somehow the Disk Utility did not delete the associated Preboot, Recovery, and VM part of the Volume Group. Disk Utility hides them, but diskutil shows them. I do not see a deleteVolume option in disk utility.
 
These instructions from Catalina for a APFS partition on a different disk from the currently booted macOS:

1) In Disk Utility.app, select "Show All Devices...".
2) Select the "Container" for the Preboot, Recovery, VM, and OS that you want to remove.
3) Click "Partition" icon.
4) Click "Partition" button.
5) Make sure the Container is selected. Click "-" button.
6) Click "Apply".
 
These instructions from Catalina for a APFS partition on a different disk from the currently booted macOS:

1) In Disk Utility.app, select "Show All Devices...".
2) Select the "Container" for the Preboot, Recovery, VM, and OS that you want to remove.
3) Click "Partition" icon.
4) Click "Partition" button.
5) Make sure the Container is selected. Click "-" button.
6) Click "Apply".
I do not want to delete the Container. It contains other Volume I want to keep.
 
Since Disk Utility.app doesn't show the non system volumes of the APFS container, then I guess you need to use the command line to delete them.

I believe the command is:
sudo diskutil apfs deleteVolume diskAsB

To learn more about the diskutil command:
Type diskutil in Terminal.app without pressing return. Select the work, right click it and select "Open man Page".
 
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