Thanks, JoeMike. I appreciate all you do for me. I am willing to wait if you want to rewrite it. Would it be easier to dictate on the Mac and then just correct the boo-boo's the Mac makes when it misunderstands you? Anyway, I'm in no hurry.

I compared my symptoms to Covid, and I don't believe I have it. Just a chest cold or a slight case of bronchitis. Taste and smell intact. No dry cough. No fever. Whew!







Originally Posted by joemikeb
Okay I will comment in BLUE. Please bear with me as I am dictating rather than typing. My left hand is in a sling and bandaged after surgery Wednesday. So I will keep my remarks brief. [color:#993399] You have an owie on your hand, and I have a cold or a sinus infeciton, so this may have to be put off. Anyway.... Now I am using red and I hope your cold rr sinus is just that and not anything more dangerous. I hope you haven't lost your sense of smell or taste shocked
My goals are:
  • to get rid of the partitions on your internal drive
  • to be sure you have a valid copy of your data
  • to reduce the possibility of error to a minimum
  • to end up with a clean copy of your existing OS on the internal drive ready for upgrade

To accomplish all of this with surety requires some extra steps. I believe they are worth it to be sure it was done right.
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Given you have a bootable copy of Sierra on your external drive we can shortcut the process.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DO NOT GET AHEAD OF ME.

FOLLOW EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING STEPS IN EXACT SEQUENCE
I BOOT FROM THE EXTERNAL CLONE
1 Attach your external drive to your computer
2 While booted from the internal drive on your computer,
3 Verify you have SuperDuper installed on the external drive I do just checking
4 if possible verify the missing files are on the external drive They are good
5 go to System Preferences > Startup Disk
6 Select the Sierra 2015 as the boot drive
7 Click on Restart (When this completes you should be booted from Sierra on the external drive)
II PREPARE THE INTERNAL DRIVE
1 Open Disk Utility
2 in the Disk Utility sidebar, select the internal drive DRIVE (Be sure you select the physical drive not one of the paartitions on the drive) I am assuming you mean click on the drive called Apple SSD because below that and indented is Mac HD and then Mojave and Catalina. was the screenshot unclear? [color:#CC33CC]Mine says apple SSD so I was making sure. Yes the outented portion.[/color] Not sure what outented means. Typo? outdented is the opposite of indented
3 On the Disk Utility tool bar select Erase (It's grayed out) then Name: Macintosh HD, Format Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Scheme: GUID Partition Map
well heckey darn I guess we're gonna have to do it the hard way.
  • click on partition
  • select the last partition on the drive
  • click on the minus sign at the bottom of the list [color:#993399](I think this is what I did orignially to try to get rid of Mojave and Catalina partitions but I will do it again.)
  • click apply
  • click done
  • repeat for the second partition on the list
  • when you get down to only one partition on the drive then you can erase the drive as in the original instructions

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4 Click Erase (again?)(This will effectively erase all content on your internal drive and all partitions) (Again, it's grayed out)
III CLONE SIERRA BACK TO THE INTERNAL DRIVE
• I don't have SuperDuper as an exemplar but I believe you know how to use it correctly. Your target drive is labeled Macintosh HD (I don't know how to do this. Can I skip this step? I probably won't be using Sierra again anyway except on my older mac.) there is no consideration for your older Mac in these instructions. [color:#993399]I know, I just wanted you to know that I have access to Sierra on my older Mac should I mess something up on my newer Mac while doing this. However if you do it my way you will retain a copy of Sierra on your external Drive that you could move to if you need it. I was trying to say I don't care if I have Sierra on my external drive if it would be easier to do it another way. Have you ever used super Duper? You know I have. That's what I've been talking about. That's how I transferred stuff to my external drive. The only thing that is different here you would be selecting the external drive as the source and the internal drive as the target or where you are cloning too.[/color]
IV BOOT FROM THE INTERNAL DRIVE
1 While booted from the external drive go to System Preferences > Startup Disk
2 Select Macintosh HD as the boot drive (You mean Apple SSD which is above the Mac HD in the list?)
3 Click on Restart (when this completes you should be running Sierra from the internal drive on your computer and have a full 120GB available storage)
4 If your missing files were on the eternal drive they will now e on your internal drive. If not, you should have had a backup system like Time Machine running regularly.
V IF YOU WISH TO UPGRADE TO CATALINA
1 Open App Store
2 Search for Catalina
3 Click on Get
4 Follow the on-screen instructions.
5 Your computer screen will go blank several times and there will be excruciatingly long pauses but after 45 minutes or so...
6 You will be prompted for your logon password and you will be running Catalina
a There will be a new folder on your desktop that you can ignore
b Your internal drive will have been converted to APFS and there will be four APFS volumes on your internal drive (all showing a capacity of 120GB -- I will explain what is going on if you are interested)
c As time goes on, you will find you need to approve all sorts of things as part of Catalina's increased security precautions
d You will need to immediately update OnyX, SuperSuper, and probably a few other applications.
e You will have entered the 21st century of Apple computing
f If you switch to Carbon Copy Cloner you can turn on APFS Snapshots which will provide some limited protection against inadvertent file loss. (I tried CCC in the past and found it confusing, so I will stick with SuperDuper.) help me understand what you are concerned about in step III if super Duper is so easy It's not that it's not easy, it's that I don't know what I am doing half the time. I tried to find a way to send what was on the ext. drive to my internal drive and couldn't see how. I will look again, but I want this to be as simple as possible, leaving out the external drive all together until I download Catalina and then will back it up to SuperDuper after all is said and done. Your partitions on your internal drive make that very difficult maybe even impossible

If there are any major steps I can avoid because I am not going to use Sierra, let me know. Thanks for all your time, JoeMike. I appreciate it.
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Get better, and I will too, and then we can hopefully fix this.

Rita, if you had a more recent operating system than Sierra, and if you did not have all the partitions on your internal drive, and you were more confident of what you are doing, and were willing to risk ending up at some point within non-bootable system, I could eliminate some steps. But you do not have a large enough partition to upgrade Sierra on your internal drive -- there simply isn't enough room. That is why we're going through all these steps. I want you to have a safe uneventful transition. While you can nondestructively remove partitions -- particularly in later versions of macOS — but that doesn't always work and the has a risk of ending up with a non-bootable system. I know there are a lot of steps and you wish you could eliminate some. Personally I can't think of a safe way of making the transition other than what I have outlined. If you are willing to go through with it. If I can get a free copy of Super Duper I will see if I can add specific superduper instructions. At this point I am beginning to wonder if I shouldn't rewrite the entire set of instructions? What do you think? It would mean waiting until I regain the use of my left hand because of all the typing it would require. [/quote]

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