Urgent! Accidentally erased Macintosh Data but I run on an M1. Now there’s no disk to reinstall big sur and my work laptop is a vegetable

[mediummacknowledge]

Getting straight to the point, the main difference in the process of erasing Macs for intel and for Apple silicon is that you’re supposed to press the minus button (-) undef volume for Macintosh Data when erasing an Intel chip. I did this and now my sidebar looks like this:

When I tried to reinstall MacOS Big Sur, there was no disk to reinstall it on.

I tried to erase the “Apple SSD AP0…” but it said process failed:

I don’t know where to go from here, any assistance at all would be infinitely appreciated.

 

[nguyen6323]

To erase a volume without removing it, you would press the Erase button.
The minus button removes the volume completely.
You can press the + to add a new volume again

 

[Apple_Robert]

Boot back into recovery and delete container disk 3 & 5, and then try deleting Apple SSD with the numbers in it.

There is no need to tap the - or plus key during this process unless you are really speaking about clicking on view all devices, so that all the disks and containers show.

 

[casperes1996]

Yeah this is no different to the expected behaviour on an Intel machine.
You can erase the base disk or container or just add another volume to the container

 

[mediummacknowledge]

Boot back into recovery and delete container disk 3 & 5, and then try deleting Apple SSD with the numbers in it.

There is no need to tap the - or plus key during this process unless you are really speaking about clicking on view all devices, so that all the disks and containers show.

Yeah this is no different to the expected behaviour on an Intel machine.
You can erase the base disk or container or just add another volume to the container

Thank you very much! I erased the container disk and then an option showed up to reinstall Big Sur on! I can't say thank you enough I really appreciate it!

 

[Apple_Robert]

Thank you very much! I erased the container disk and then an option showed up to reinstall Big Sur on! I can't say thank you enough I really appreciate it!

Glad we could help. It can be scary when you have a new M1 and something like this happens and you feel stuck.

 

[casperes1996]

Thank you very much! I erased the container disk and then an option showed up to reinstall Big Sur on! I can't say thank you enough I really appreciate it!

Yeah, concur with Robert. I can empathise with the scare, but happy you have it all fixed and figured out