Wiped and reinstalled and now my drive is split?

[kat.hayes]

I used Command + R while rebooting to wipe my MBP because it was seriously running poorly and I reinstalled Big Sur.

There was am option to turn on File Encryption during setup, and I selected it.

Now I see that I have a partitioned drive (I think) with the name of the drive it asked me to name after wiping my old one (Capacity=1TB, Available 179.12GB, Used=21.56GB) and a new drive named Untitled - Data (Capacity = 1TB, Available = 179GB, Used=805GB)

1. Why did this happen? What is going on? Did the drive not even get wiped? All of my old files and applications are not on this Mac. The whole wiping and reinstalling process took at least a 1.5 hrs.
2. Now I try coping folders off my old Time Machine backup to my new Documents folder and I get a message that I do not have enough space.
3. What do I need to do to fix this?

edit: I wiped it and reinstalled the os again, and this time there are 3 drives. The original, the new one and the last one. Why is it doing this???

Thanks!

 

[kevinleecutler]

I used Command + R while rebooting to wipe my MBP because it was seriously running poorly and I reinstalled Big Sur.

There was am option to turn on File Encryption during setup, and I selected it.

Now I see that I have a partitioned drive (I think) with the name of the drive it asked me to name after wiping my old one (Capacity=1TB, Available 179.12GB, Used=21.56GB) and a new drive named Untitled - Data (Capacity = 1TB, Available = 179GB, Used=805GB)

1. Why did this happen? What is going on? Did the drive not even get wiped? All of my old files and applications are not on this Mac. The whole wiping and reinstalling process took at least a 1.5 hrs.
2. Now I try coping folders off my old Time Machine backup to my new Documents folder and I get a message that I do not have enough space.
3. What do I need to do to fix this?

edit: I wiped it and reinstalled the os again, and this time there are 3 drives. The original, the new one and the last one. Why is it doing this???

Thanks!

it maybe a case of doing a complete clean install, it might be something you are doing in disk utility that is causing this. its now normal for Mac to split the drives in a sense Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data so in the case you just want to reinstall the OS without losing data you now can

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

When I tried to wipe my MacBook Pro and reinstall Big Sur, I found several 'drives', and when I tried to reinstall Big Sur with some of the drives existing, it failed. I then went and deleted all of the 'drives' and tried again, and it installed fine.

If you are wiping your system, perhaps you didn't delete all of the drives shown? I thought that by deleting all of them, I might 'break' something, but since the system was already broken, software wise, I wasn't losing much. And it must have recreated all of them.

But more likely:

But as an aside, perhaps it created a 'drive' for encryption when it created the system during the install? Why it would create a separate 'drive' is odd... You don't say what your original capacity is, so is it a ghost drive, echoing the same capacity, or did it divide a 2t drive in half? Either explanation is odd, unless Big Sur does encryption differently than earlier macOS versions by creating a specific encrypted drive. Hmm. Interesting...

 

[posguy99]

edit: I wiped it and reinstalled the os again, and this time there are 3 drives. The original, the new one and the last one. Why is it doing this???

Because you didn't erase the *drive*, you erased one of the volumes in the container, then aimed the installer at that, and it quite happily took that volume, split in two, and installed the OS. Just like it's supposed to.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

Because you didn't erase the *drive*, you erased one of the volumes in the container, then aimed the installer at that, and it quite happily took that volume, split in two, and installed the OS. Just like it's supposed to.

But see my post. I walked away thinking that, for some reason, Big Sur choked on one, or all of the drives. It never installed, it literally crashed. As I said, flushing all of the drives, ALL of the drives and volumes (sorry for not being clear on that) so that Disk Util showed *nothing*. THEN install took over and was happy.

I remember the prompt, and thought it odd to ask at that point. File Vault runs on the whole drive, so asking ahead of time just sounded weird, and I thought how it would encrypt the whole drive, not create a separate drive. Sounds like an implementation issue. File Vault doesn't usually run that way, to my knowledge.

Maybe flush all drives and volumes, reinstall, say 'HECK NO' to that question, and then after install, enable File Vault?

 

[w0lf]

Are you actually wiping the drive?

Use Disk Utility to erase an Intel-based Mac - Apple Support

How to erase (format) the built-in startup disk of an Intel-based Mac.

support.apple.com

 

[kat.hayes]

After about 5 reformats (at least I thought they were reformats) through Disk Utility and OS reinstalls I finally got it fixed. I am still confused by the difference between volumes and just my SSD. In the past I know I always used Disk Utility to wipe my drive, perhaps it was only wiping hard drives, and SSD are different? I pulled up some Apple support page and this is what they recommended before selling your Mac so I am very confused.

I ended up making a bootable USB flash drive based on advice from the forums and booted to that and was able to wipe and reinstall that way. Thanks for the help!

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

You were removing the partition table. they tell the OS and installer that there are no volumes or partitions on that drive because there is no table to refer to. There is no difference in the basic operation of an SSD and a spinning hard drive to the OS. They are devices that are for storing files and the operating system. (Sometimes referred to as 'logical drives') Each drive has a 'partition table', which tells the OS where the partitions are. 'Wiping a drive' deletes that information, but does not actually physically 'wipe the drive'. It just obliterates the table to tell where things are, or were. No table means the drive is 'clean', ready to be used. There is a way to actually 'wipe a drive', but it's not used much as it's a very time consuming process were the program actually writes data to the entire physical device. Before disposing of a computer, or anything that has storage, it's recommended to do a 'full wipe', just in case, and there are various levels of that process. (The DOD specifies that a hard drive isn't 'safe' without several runs of a program writing different patterns on the entire surface of a hard drive. It can take many hours to DOD wipe a hard drive, even days)

Volumes can be both a distinct physical drive, or a partition of a drive. Volumes can also span multiple drives. It's a way of separating and organizing drive space, and a place to put the operating system, and also recovery 'hidden' partitions/volumes. So as an example, the standard 'Macintosh HD' has several volumes on it. Windows does the same thing. Disk Util sees the physical drive as an area to put volumes. Without a volume or partition, the drive is unusable. Volume and partition are often used interchangeably too. So, like when I described the problem I had reinstalling Big Sur, I had a volume, or partition that the installer app didn't want to see. That's as close as I can describe it, because after I wiped all of the volumes/partitions on that SSD, the installer went and recreated them and installed Big Sur. Doing a quick Google, many people use those words interchangeably. I'm sure there are purists that will object, but *shrug*. I still use 'partition', and never picked up the 'volume' usage. Again: *shrug*

And, creating a bootable install flash drive is the best way, short of having Apple install media, which I don't think they do anymore. Save that drive for the future. You may need it again. I've got flash drives around here for several versions of macOS. Very handy to have around...