Unmounted volumes on hard disc

Bobbio50 wrote:

Just had a clean install of Catalina on my hard disc. In disk utility there are 2 unmounted volumes taking up over 600 gigs of space. I’m afraid to restore from time machine backup via migration assistant, because last time I tried this, it wouldn’t finish because of not enough disk space. I called Apple support and they said that I could delete/erase one of these volumes. Unfortunately the person I talked to didn’t seem to know too much about it. What is on the volumes or how can I check to see what is in them? Is it safe to delete them. I have a years worth of back ups from time machine on an external HD also in which I would like to restore from a back up a month ago.

Lets see the output from the command line

'

From the Terminal.app copy and paste:

Diskutil list internal

You should see something similar to :

MacBook-Pro ~ % Diskutil list internal

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0

1: EFI EFI 314.6 MB disk0s1

2: Apple_APFS Container disk1 1.0 TB disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):

#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER

0: APFS Container Scheme - +1.0 TB disk1

Physical Store disk0s2

1: APFS Volume Macintosh HD 11.1 GB disk1s1

2: APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data 260.7 GB disk1s2

3: APFS Volume Preboot 80.8 MB disk1s3

4: APFS Volume Recovery 528.1 MB disk1s4

5: APFS Volume VM 7.5 GB disk1s5

Are these local to the machine or external? But more importantly, what are you trying to do? If your goal is to setup a "new" partition from a Time Machine backup, then startup in Recovery and do just that - as long as the OS believes that the partition that you are trying to recover to has sufficiently more free space than the backup you are trying to recover from, it should be okay with that. Hardware failure en route not withstanding, any other disk images should remain as they were.

I have a similar question... I did what you suggested above and mine looks pretty much the same as you posted. But I still have a questiona about the unmounted volume shown here.