Partitioning help!

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2013 Mac - I updated a while ago to Big Sur from Catalina and it caused problems for me. I managed to reinstall Catalina but think in doing so I created a partition that's essentially significantly reduced by hard drive size (in the form of usable space).

In disc utilities, I have APPLE SSD SD0128F Media as the top level, then Container disk1 under that with 4 sub categories:

disk1s5 (greyed out) - shows 0kb, not mounted

Macintosh HD - Data (greyed out) - shows 0kb, not mounted

Update - 11.25GB

Update - Data - 16GB

Can anyone help if I've done something stupid please and how best to remedy it?!

Also, this has come off the back of a lack of space. I also don't know if my Mac has downloaded a version(s) of Big Sur that hasn't been installed but is just taking up space. I can't see it in the launcher which is where I believe it would be, but if there's somewhere else, that may be helpful to know!

The only real positive is that there's a very limited amount of personal files on here as they're stored externally.

Thanks anyone in advance!
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

First off...do you have a current Time Machine or other backup of your data?

I guess some of what you are seeing would depend on the actual process you used to reinstall Catalina. The recommended downgrade workflow would be to completely erase and reinstall from scratch.

C
 
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That’s true, Cory, but Big Sur would have updated the firmware on the Mac so if you try to reinstall macOS from Recovery, it will only offer Big Sur. Another way to install Catalina is by booting from an external drive with Catalina installed. I think, hope, that booting from it into Recovery will default the macOS reinstall to Catalina. Otherwise, the external boot drive will need a Catalina installer file to run the installation. Make sense?

The main HD/SSD will still need to be wiped completely, so Time Machine will be needed for migration.
 
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I've manually backed up things like photos and documents, so don't have Time Machine. My concern was if I reformat again, would it just focus on one partition and ignore the other?

(I'm also assuming I don't end up creating a third partition in the process!!)

So I'm assuming I can download an OS and put it on a flash drive, then install from that and that should install a clean copy of the OS and remove the partition in the process?
 

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