Cannot Downgrade to Monterey from Ventura

That's a great point Barney. Thank you. Mine shipped last August with Monterey. Attached is a current snapshot of the Disk Utility - and I had to create a new volume which I called Monterey. The original "Macintosh HD" which I will loosely call "Volume" - it shows up in Disk Utility. The original volume shows Ventura (13.1) from my upgrade activity I did. There also appeared to be another uniquely named volume (not showing now) that was about 1.8G presumably with an image. I had an option to erase that image but was nervous to do it, so i created a volume "Monterey". All would be fine BUT "Monterey" does not show up in Finder. And to get to the Library and other places via Finder I have to click MacintoshHD and then select "show in enclosing folder" to find the real OS folders.

My question is - can I make this always show up in Finder (and the options to do that do not work or don't exist when I right click) - OR do I need to reset again, use Disk Utility to try to wipe everything (and I need better instructions) to move this one forward.

Not sure what the long term impact is of my choice.

This is not my primary machine. I moved files off to external drives and/or iCloud.

I didn't look clearly at the drive utility until after I started the reset process.

Bottom line is - 1) How can I get the Monterey volume to show up in Finder 2) how should I / could I format or erase all partitions to truly start from scratch? Perhaps I need to go read more about the disk utility functions, etc - and then remove all partitions and let the Monterey Installer set it up. However - stuck somewhere on the drive / volume was the imprint of OS13.1 which told the installer process "no downgrade of this partition / volume / drive" (using those three terms loosely again).

Many thanks.

Chris 

My work around was this. I noticed that the hard drive volume labeled MacintoshHD was tied to os13. I created a new volume / partition that I named MontereyHD. That new volume then was the target for my OS install from the downloaded Monterey image. It worked for me. I was at the Genius Bar two weeks ago and I showed it to the guy they brought from the back room and he said that is fine. You will appear to have two drives - and I had to make sure MontereyHD was visible in Finder. I hope this helps you.