Macintosh SSD and Macintosh SSD Data drive?

[Bradley Street]

everything functions correctly with the exception of my drive showing up As two different drives on my desktop. I have Macintosh SSD and Macintosh SSD - Data

same drive. Just pops up. I can right click the data one, which is the one that’s useless, and hit eject and it’s fine.
I’ve ran into this issue on my MBPro and I fixed it, however I can’t remember how. I went to disk utilities and Unmounted the data drive and it still just keeps coming up on every restart. How do I get rid of this?

 

[BrianBaughn]

What does the situation look like in Disk Utility after a restart and before you eject? Post a screenshot of the app if you can.

 

[Bradley Street]

Idk why there’s three drives mounted. There all the same drive. It baffles me. If I unmount the two data drives it unmounts the first one automatically. I just unmount the bottom one and I still have the same issue on boot up every time. Attached the second picture with the two drives that are the one SSD.

 

[Taz Mangus]

Click on View, select Show All Devices. Post the picture. I suspect that you have 2 containers, each with a "Macintosh SSD - Data". What is in the contents os the second "Macintosh SSD - Data"?

To remove the second "Macintosh SSD - Data", click on the top device (above all the Containers), press the Partition button. In the pie chart, select the empty "Macintosh SSD - Data", press the '-' button to remove it.

 

[chabig]

It could also be an extraneous volume in the same container as the other two. We'll need to see all devices to know for sure.

Bradley...an easy way to figure out which is the extraneous volume is to rename the "Macintosh SSD - Data" that is sitting on your desktop. For example, rename it to "Delete". Then when you look in Disk Utility you'll know exactly which one to remove.

 

[Bradley Street]

I did some tinkering before I received both of your suggestions. I deleted the third one and restarted. It no longer appears. Here is a screen of the partition table and the drives it shows on disk utility. I think the problem is resolved. Clean my Mac even shows the correct number of volumes now. Just one.

 

[chabig]

It looks like you got it. It would be nice if you'd select "Show all Devices" in Disk Utility and then repost the picture. That would help others who find this thread in the future. They will see both volumes inside one APFS container.

 

[Bradley Street]

Here ya go. Thanks for all your help everyone!

 

[Taz Mangus]

Congrats on fixing it.

 

[laurayuan]

If you are running Catalina on an SSD, then the drive is formatted APFS. As such, APFS creates a space on the drive called a "container." The container has five volumes within it. They are as follows:

Macintosh SSD - visible and mounts on the Desktop

Macintosh SSD - Data - invisible but mounted

Preboot - invisible

Recovery - invisible and the equivalent of the Recovery HD

PM - invisible

The Data drive should not be visible on your Desktop. If you open Disk Utility and change the View dropdown menu to Show all devices, then you will see the basic structure of the container and the first two volumes. If you see two Data volumes, then the configuration has been corrupted.

You cannot stop this because it's integral to an APFS formatted startup disk. You are damaging the configuration by not knowing what you are doing or why. You should learn to ask before doing something you don't know about rather than after the fact.

I think that now you should start over from scratch. After reinstalling Catalina, please do not mess with the drive configuration.