I run a late 2014 Mac Mini with Mojave on a 250 GB solid state hard drive. Recently I upgraded to Monterey but decided to revert to Mojave and in the process I somehow created a partition on the hard drive called Update (see attached). It only has a few MBs on it (see attached). How can I delete the partition without affecting the main hard drive?
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Removing a hard drive partition
- Thread starter mikethebook
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After booting from your Mojave installation USB, you should be able to delete the partition using the Disk Utility app. However, you're going to need to erase the entire drive during the Mojave re-installation anyway. macOS supports upgrade installs which preserve your apps, files and settings, but downgrade installs aren't supported and are unlikely to work properly. Hopefully you still have the Time Machine (or other) backup that you made before upgrading to Monterey to restore your apps, files and settings.
This is tricky now,
If you did a clean install of Mojave?
(no more Monterey)
you can delete any partition.
if so, a simply delete of that partition should do the trick.
but the this update part on a APFS might be needed as that is a container,
but that should be only the size of the data nothing more as APFS has containers now.
what i did with my 2012 macmini running Mojave/catalina on 2 portioned volumes
was press or select the minus option on the catalina part, containers and all were gone,
then that booted to Mojave only.
I would wait until someone has the exact circumstance as you,
since i never deleted any containers, or sub folders in APFS formatted drives since they are needed.
If you did a clean install of Mojave?
(no more Monterey)
you can delete any partition.
if so, a simply delete of that partition should do the trick.
but the this update part on a APFS might be needed as that is a container,
but that should be only the size of the data nothing more as APFS has containers now.
what i did with my 2012 macmini running Mojave/catalina on 2 portioned volumes
was press or select the minus option on the catalina part, containers and all were gone,
then that booted to Mojave only.
I would wait until someone has the exact circumstance as you,
since i never deleted any containers, or sub folders in APFS formatted drives since they are needed.
Thanks for your replies. I was hoping not to have to get involved an another installation. Presumably, I can't just reboot to a backup disk and delete the partition in disk utility. Presumably it's not as simple as that.
And upgrading to Catalina wouldn't take of the problem either unless it was a clean install which, as I say, I don't want to get involved in.
And upgrading to Catalina wouldn't take of the problem either unless it was a clean install which, as I say, I don't want to get involved in.
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Thanks, Grumpus. The only concern I have is whether deleting the stuff on Update will cause any problems.
I don't believe removing the Update volume will cause any problems, but you'll feel better about deleting it after you've backed your system up. I use Time Machine, but a lot of people like SuperDuper! (free for basic use) or Carbon Copy Cloner (free trial).
I use Carbon Copy Cloner to keep a backup but those backups will not include the Update volume so once it is deleted it will not be retrievable.
Ok, well, you don't need it anyway, it's a remnant of the Monterey install and Mojave doesn't use it.
