Yeah it was a weird one... Thanks for reply. Turns out I clicked on the wrong item in Disk Utility when trying to erase it. That worked fine once I did the right item. Fortunately I had a Time Machine backup but I broke my own backup rule and didn't do one before, so unfortunately the last one I did was Jan 13 so several weeks old. I didn't do much on it locally except some tax docs and I can get those again.. It's back up and running directly on 12.7.4. Third time doing TM restore since I've owned it/a Mac since 2018 and first time for emergency recovery. Sure wish I knew why it freaked out. Trim was enabled. SMART status was verified. No performance issues.. This ADATA has been very reliable since I bought it over 5 years ago. I think somehow the update messed it up. It totally lost the OS partitions. I've never seen that before.. Hopefully this one was just a fluke and no one else has issues with this latest update.
So, if it says it's still on 12.6, I would try and figure out where the download is stored and delete it if that's a possibility, and do it again... I did a quick search and I don't know if that's even a possibility.. Sorry I don't know more.. Before you attempt anything you should make sure you have a good backup somehow in case you have to do what I did..
