2 Macintosh HD Icons on My Desktop

[edward-k]

I have an old mac mini (2012) running 10.14.6. Last year a local Apple repair shop upgraded the HD to a 2TB SSD. Now my desktop has two Macintosh HD icons. Everything works fine so i didn't think much of it. However, i just ordered a new m2 mac mini so i can run the current OS. I was hoping to get this issue resolved before I get the new one and restore a backup. Does anyone know why I have 2 icons now? can i delete one? are they both being backed up when time machine does it's thing?

My apologies in advance if this is a basic question. I am a casual PC user (web, email, photos, etc). I have attached a few photos below to hopefully assist. Thanks in advance.

 

[sfphoto]

So looking at your photos, one shows 11+gb used the other 900+gb used.
When you open the 11gb used are the contents different than what resides on the other 900gb used disk?

Might the 2tb drive be partitioned?
Might there be two internal drives?

Both seem unlikely. But this problem IS a concern.
More likely is that the Mac directory needs rebuilding.

I don't think you can restore the Mac with your most recent backup as you now have the two same named icons. This assumes, and one would hope, your backup was prior to this present problem.

If mine I would rebuild the directory from a boot disc (i.e. Disk Warrior).

 

[Nermal]

Open Terminal and type "diskutil list", then post the results here.

 

[edward-k]

Open Terminal and type "diskutil list", then post the results here.

Hope this is what you were requesting...thanks again...Ed

 

[edward-k]

So looking at your photos, one shows 11+gb used the other 900+gb used.
When you open the 11gb used are the contents different than what resides on the other 900gb used disk?

Might the 2tb drive be partitioned?
Might there be two internal drives?

Both seem unlikely. But this problem IS a concern.
More likely is that the Mac directory needs rebuilding.

I don't think you can restore the Mac with your most recent backup as you now have the two same named icons. This assumes, and one would hope, your backup was prior to this present problem.

If mine I would rebuild the directory from a boot disc (i.e. Disk Warrior).

Thanks for your reply...The correct number should be closer to 1TB, the old hard drive that was pulled out was 1Tb and completely filled before the SSD upgrade. I don't believe the SSD was partitioned, unless the repair shop did that. There is only one drive. Here are a few screen shots of the contents of each drive. Thanks again for your help, it's much appreciated. Ed

 

[Nermal]

View attachment 2161475

Hope this is what you were requesting...thanks again...Ed

That's the one. It almost looks right... except you have two "Macintosh HD" volumes (disk1s1 and disk1s5) and no "Macintosh HD - Data". It looks from the size like disk1s1 is supposed to be Data.

I'm not sure how to fix that.

Edit: Correction. You're on 10.14, which isn't meant to have a Data volume. I wonder why there are two Macintosh HD volumes on there then...

 

[DeltaMac]

OP is running macOS 10.14.6 Mojave, which does not have a - Data volume. That started with 10.15 Catalina

Looks like the repair shop "helped" you by adding a shared volume to the APFS container.
Could be worthwhile to rename one of the volumes.
You might want to discover which volume you are booted to, and change the name of the other volume
I suspect that the one with folder created dates more than 2 years old, is probably the one that you could rename, as it appears to be hardly used, but you should check that for sure.
(The renaming would not really affect much of anything, just make it a bit less confusing to look at.)

 

[sfphoto]

> Looks like the repair shop "helped" you by adding a shared volume to the APFS container
If that is the case then a Disk Warrior rebuild might not help.

If my Mini I would want to start fresh by restoring from a backup that had only one Mac HD icon.

On the other hand if your new 'M' model is meant as a replacement and you plan to retire the 2012 you could simply re-format and install some OS.

Hopefully the backup you plan on using to restore to the new M machine does not have this dual icon issue.

 

[edward-k]

> Looks like the repair shop "helped" you by adding a shared volume to the APFS container
If that is the case then a Disk Warrior rebuild might not help.

If my Mini I would want to start fresh by restoring from a backup that had only one Mac HD icon.

On the other hand if your new 'M' model is meant as a replacement and you plan to retire the 2012 you could simply re-format and install some OS.

Hopefully the backup you plan on using to restore to the new M machine does not have this dual icon issue.

Thank you! I upgraded my drive over a year ago and the system has worked perfectly since then so any time machine backup I had is long gone. I still have the old physical hard drive but my new SSD has a bunch of new photos, docs, etc. that are not backed up on the original drive. I am almost thinking at this point when the new m2 Mini shows up I will treat it like a new machine and not restore from anything. I have almost 50k photos in iPhoto that i need to figure out how to move, but I guess i can just save them to an external HD and move them to the new m2 mini manually.

 

[chabig]

At this point, I think I would just open and check to see whether there is any data in the smaller volume (disk1s5). If not, I'd delete it using Disk Utility. If there is data you want to save, copy it to the other volume (disk1s1) first.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Thanks for your reply...The correct number should be closer to 1TB, the old hard drive that was pulled out was 1Tb and completely filled before the SSD upgrade. I don't believe the SSD was partitioned, unless the repair shop did that. There is only one drive. Here are a few screen shots of the contents of each drive. Thanks again for your help, it's much appreciated. Ed

It’s not “Partitioned” exactly, somehow or another you just got a second “Volume” added. It SHOULD be safe to delete the small, nearly-empty volume from Disk Utility. I’d make sure you have a solid backup first, “Just in case” though.

 

[edward-k]

Thank you everyone for your help!

 

[zarmanto]

Is this still an outstanding issue for you, Ed? I ask because I only just happened upon this thread and had some thoughts. While the two volumes are named the same, they are clearly two separate partitions on the drive; if you were to rename one of them, it might become slightly clearer what is going on. More interestingly: if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the repair shop which upgraded the drive for you simply imaged the original 1TB drive over on to the 2TB drive... so they didn't exactly do you any favors, here, since it kind'a looks like you don't even have access to the entire 2TB.

If it were me, I'd do a manual (non-Time Machine) backup of all my data and then repartition the drive to a single 2TB volume.