Too many disks in terminal in internet recovery

mr_boombastic1 wrote:

When I go into internet recovery and into terminal and type "diskutil list" I see about 20-ish disks. I have 2017 iMac with a Fusion Drive and a Windows bootcamp partition, but nothing else. All the disks are somewhat small at a couple megabytes but I cannot delete them or find why this space is being taken away from my disk. Please help me, I really want to get rid of these frustrating useless portions of storage or at least know why I have them. Please note that I can only see these disks in internet recovery and that I fully reset my Mac to factory settings many times over the years and this "problem has never gone away". Also has anyone else noticed this problem on their own machine? pls help :(

What do you see when you are booted normally...? ie not Recovery

From the /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app copy and paste:

diskutil list internal

mr_boombastic1 wrote:

It is not a problem really, I want to know why I see these disks

You’re not seeing disks, you’re seeing partitions. There should be three “disks” here, the SSD, the HDD, and recovery. I’d expect partitions for Bootcamp and such, for macOS itself and on two devices (Fusion), for Internet recovery, and quite possibly for Time Machine, for patches, and otherwise.

Your Mac is also seemingly under-configured for your current needs (running two operating systems on a lower-end storage configuration will be tight at best), and you’ll want backups of it all prior to trying to delete partitions ir re-partition. Partition-level storage corruptions or errors can quite commonly be catastrophic.

When using

diskutil  list

while booted into Recovery Mode or from any macOS installer, you are seeing the internal drives & volumes along with about 20 virtual volumes associated with the macOS installer. This is all perfectly normal. Depending on the version of macOS running, you may be able to filter out those installer virtual volumes by adding the "internal" option to the command:

diskutil  list  internal

mr_boombastic1 wrote:

I do not see the 20 disks, I only see the appropriate amount, my macos and windows partition

What is the issue exactly..?

Ignore Internet Recovery if it is a problem.

mr_boombastic1 wrote:

It is not a problem really, I want to know why I see these disks

A bug or glitch.