STRANGE PARTITIONS

[clevins]

guys i went through all your comments and here is what i was doing (while you guys were replying... 🙂)
1. i went at APPLE SSD AP0256Q Media and hit ERASE
2. reinstalled Monterey OS and here is what the drive looks like:
View attachment 1986921

View attachment 1986922

View attachment 1986923

So guys whats your verdict on this ?
*just remember that all this started because prior to deleting Monterey OS (1st time) i was only seeing :
Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD - Data.

This is fine. It's the Volumes only view.

You never had a problem. All of the "click the top entry with numbers and erase" people were wrong.

Look, I get wanting to understand but - read on the web about APFS and how the partition scheme is done for that. You're wasting time redoing the drive over and over.

PS: read our replies. I showed you how mine looks above your last post.

 

[Apple_Robert]

As an example of this, here's my drive with Show Volumes:

View attachment 1986791
and here it is with Show All Devices:
View attachment 1986792

Anyone telling you to delete the top line is dangerously ignorant or deliberately malicious.

I am far from either. There is nothing malicious about deleting the top drive which gets recreated with the same naming automatically by the OS.

My fault this morning was attempting to go by memory as to what the drive looks like, instead of doing a remote into my Mac at home to take a look before commenting. I should have done that first. My apology to the OP. Had the OP done as I stated, his Mac would not have suffered harm. Apple Support has had me do such in the past. He already stated he didn't have anything important.

I made a mistake. It happens sometimes. I don't need your insult. When you are perfect, then you can insult people.

 

[Mike Boreham]

guys i went through all your comments and here is what i was doing (while you guys were replying... 🙂)
1. i went at APPLE SSD AP0256Q Media and hit ERASE
2. reinstalled Monterey OS and here is what the drive looks like:
View attachment 1986921

View attachment 1986922

View attachment 1986923

So guys whats your verdict on this ?
*just remember that all this started because prior to deleting Monterey OS (1st time) i was only seeing :
Macintosh HD & Macintosh HD - Data.

OP...just checking that you have taken on board what @clevins showed in #22, that there are two different views available in Disk Utility (view drop down):

Apologies if you understand this.

 

[winxmac]

I have a very limited macOS experience [High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina] due to Hackintosh and have never used Big Sur and Monterey but I think it was to always make sure to click/select show all devices before doing erase or reformat in Windows terms... Erase/format can only be done in [Internet] Recovery mode in macOS... The disk volume feature was introduced in Catalina which somehow confused some users when attempting to erase the boot drive...

In Linux/macOS, the drive must be unmounted while in Windows, the drive must not be in use before it can be erased/formatted... You can force it but be prepared for possible data loss or boot/file system corruption...

 

[clevins]

I am far from either. There is nothing malicious about deleting the top drive which gets recreated with the same naming automatically by the OS.

My fault this morning was attempting to go by memory as to what the drive looks like, instead of doing a remote into my Mac at home to take a look before commenting. I should have done that first. My apology to the OP. Had the OP done as I stated, his Mac would not have suffered harm. Apple Support has had me do such in the past. He already stated he didn't have anything important.

I made a mistake. It happens sometimes. I don't need your insult. When you are perfect, then you can insult people.

So, fair point. But telling someone to delete the root drive so they wipe everything without knowing more about what they're doing and why is careless.

I'm not going to belabor this but especially when telling people to reformat things, it's far better to be really sure.