Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems I'm back about partitioning

You said earlier: After all this is settled, you need to strongly consider a round of MAJOR housecleaning getting rid of old MacOS versions and repartitioning and reformatting both of your drives. Your drives are becoming so fractured the partitions may become unusably small and unlike APFS volumes removing a partition may not be possible or it may destroy data in other partitions. You really need to simplify.

When I read both your drives, I assumed you meant my Ext. HD and my SSD.

Also, if APFS started with High Sierra, I guess I can start with that and let it absorb my apps, etc. from Sierra when I update. I guess I will take away my two partitions that I made for Mojave and Catalina on my SSD for now. I will leave Sierra on my SSD and just update it with High Sierra and go from there. I wish I could make the leap you want me to, but I so dread the learning curve. I will have to just take one step at a time. If I continue to have problems with Amazon reviews (which is entirely possible) I will then order a new router.

Thanks again for all your input. I am taking some of your advice anyway.

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Our, or at least my suggestion about "cleaning house" on your external drive asumed there was no unique data or applications on that drive or that anything on that drive is so antique as to present a potential danger to your current data. Therefore you would not lose anything of value by erasing that drive and starting over from scratch. If that is not the case then you have a long tedious task ahead sorting and moving all the critical data you want to conserve. That might be a good use for high capacity thumb drives or, even better, an SD card if you have a reader.

If you install Mojave on your internal drive converting that drive to APFS is optional but highly recommended, if you choose Catalina converting the drive to APFS is mandatory. In either case the conversion is non-destructive and all of your compatible applications, settings, and data will be left untouched. Any applications that are incompatible will be moved to a special folder and an alias to that folder will be placed on your desktop so you will know what has happened to them. (I had a few files show up when I installed Catalina and frankly I didn't know what any of them were nor have I detected anything not working 🤷‍♂️) High Sierra, MacOS 10.13. can read data on an APFS drive but I don't believe it will install or run on APFS. Previous versions of MacOS cannot read or write to APFS volumes. [/quote]