You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

rramos001 Author

Level 1

4 points

Disk utility and disk format changed after erasing disk

On a mid2015 macbook pro with Mojave installed, after erasing the disk with the disk utility, instead of immediately running the "Reinstall macOS" utility I shut down then started up again. When I got back to the macOS Utilities and invoked the Reinstall it only allows me to install the older (El Capitan). Before I shut down, the Reinstall utility was going to reinstall Mojave. Also, after the restart the disk formatting changed so that the disk no longer contained a container. Also it didn't seem to support the newer APFS file system. Should I just go ahead and install El Capitan, then jump to Catalina from there? Any other advice regarding the disk formatting is appreciated.

MacBook Pro 15”, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jun 9, 2020 10:40 AM

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Level 9

60,380 points

Posted on Jun 9, 2020 1:21 PM

You were probably booting from the hidden recovery partition on your computer which is now gone. In theory you should still be able to boot to the online macOS installer for the last OS installed on the computer which in your case was Mojave, but it doesn't always work out that way. It may be possible to boot into the online Catalina installer by using Command + Option + R.

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT204904

If you want to reinstall Mojave, then you either need access to another Mac where you can create a bootable Mojave USB installer or you need to reinstall macOS to this computer (either El Capitan or Catalina). Then you should be able to download the Mojave installer.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

If you have a system backup you could also restore from the backup.

View in context

Disk utility and disk format changed after erasing disk

Similar questions