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Hi! I reinstalled macOS Catalina and now I have two Macintosh HD - Data and Macintosh HD - Data - Data. It also eats 30 gb of space on my 120 Gb SSD. What to do? How ti delete one one of them and free the space?

Hi! I reinstalled macOS Catalina and now I have three of Macintosh HD

Macintosh HD

Macintosh HD - Data

and Macintosh HD - Data - Data

It also eats 30 gb of space on my 120 Gb SSD. What to do? How ti delete one one of them and free the space? Computer is absolutely empty now, but I have only 90 gb of free space on it



HELP!


Posted on Nov 3, 2019 8:03 AM

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Posted on Nov 3, 2019 10:11 AM

Unless you erase the entire drive, an install will simply keep creating another Mac HD - Data drive. I guess at this point, it would not hurt to erase the Data volume (as long as you have a backup) and then see if you can choose the entry "SSD Media" (top most entry) to erase.

8 replies

Nov 3, 2019 8:18 AM in response to valdemaristore

A new feature of MacOS Catalina is that it intentionally creates one "Macintosh HD" Volume that contains only the Read-only portion of MacOS.


All Read/Write data including the /Users directory that contains user data under your login-name are placed in the new Volume, "Macintosh HD-Data".


It is important to understand that multiple Volumes sharing the same physical disk are now a normal feature of Apple File System (APFS).


For some unknown reason, your installation attempts have resulted in two of these Read/Write Volumes.


If you can determine which is "the right one" you can delete the other.


If you can not figure this out, you may need to use your Trusted Backup. To proceed, you need the Backup created right before you started the Install process.





Nov 3, 2019 8:17 AM in response to valdemaristore

I would not suggest deleting anything individually at this point. There is definitely a borked/duplicated install.


Catalina does have two volumes: Mac HD and Mac HD - Data, the first is the system and read only; the second has full access read/write.


So, I would suggest using recovery and its Disk Utility to erase the drive completely and then reinstall from scratch. Make sure you have a backup of all of your files first.

Nov 3, 2019 10:11 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks, for the answer. those volumes are not editable. I cant delete any of them. I’m going to try reinstall everything. But problem is that when i select the main storage there is two volumes. “Macintosh HD” is not editable. “Macintosh HD - data” is editable and I erased it. Then when i need to select volume for system installation I can’t choose “Macintosh HD”. Not enough space. So I selected “Macintosh HD - data”


Hi! I reinstalled macOS Catalina and now I have two Macintosh HD - Data and Macintosh HD - Data - Data. It also eats 30 gb of space on my 120 Gb SSD. What to do? How ti delete one one of them and free the space?

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