<< Solved >> "Ghost Volumes" Showing Up in OpenCore Boot Picker

[Project 2501]

I apologize if this has been answered elsewhere, but my keyword searches of the forums haven't turned up the answer.

I finally decided to upgrade MacOS by doing a clean install, but being overly cautious, I decided to install on an external HDD first, setup, and test it before cloning it back to my boot drive. When I got everything configured, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the fresh install of Catalina (yes, I know... it's not all that new, but I'd like to stick to OSX 10 a little while longer) back to my NVMe boot drive. It worked as expected, and I was able to boot into Catalina.

However, my old Mojave volume appears alongside the new Catalina volume in OC's boot picker (using OC 0.9.3). I didn't rename the drive, so it is showing 2 "bootable" volumes with the same name, but if I pick the old Mojave volume, it gives an error (something about the pre-linked kernel... can't remember exactly). If I hit <space> to show all volumes, I also see the old Mojave recovery partition as well.

This "ghost volumes" do not appear in terminal, diskutil, or Disk Utility. Disk First Aid showed no errors on the protected or data partitions of the boot drive. Clearing the NVRAM or rebuilding the kernel cache did not fix the problem.

So far, it appears to be mostly cosmetic, but I'd like a way to fix it.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[P1LGRIM]

This used to happen quite a lot with Clover and there is a guide to resolve it here :

[GUIDE] Remove extra Clover BIOS boot entries & prevent further problems

Clover is a great boot loader, and tonymacx86 has developed some great tools to get you up and running. However, some people are still having problems. I think a lot of this has to do with the design of the systems. Many have extra backup internal hard drives or partitions with legacy boot...

www.tonymacx86.com

You ought to be able to adapt it to use the OpenCore shell instead.

 

[Project 2501]

This used to happen quite a lot with Clover and there is a guide to resolve it here :

[GUIDE] Remove extra Clover BIOS boot entries & prevent further problems

Clover is a great boot loader, and tonymacx86 has developed some great tools to get you up and running. However, some people are still having problems. I think a lot of this has to do with the design of the systems. Many have extra backup internal hard drives or partitions with legacy boot...

www.tonymacx86.com

You ought to be able to adapt it to use the OpenCore shell instead.

I added OpenShell.efi to OC. typed bcfg boot dump and only got 2 entries. Both were physical drives; not surprising since I took care to only ever have one OpenCore EFI on my system. The other EFI is on a separate drive for Windows.

So I decided to try and boot the old Mojave recovery and it worked! So at least the recovery volume isn't really a ghost volume... but diskutil shows only a single 1GB recovery partition. Does that mean I have two .dmg files in that partition? When I cloned Catalina I made sure that I turned off Carbon Copy Cloner's Safety Net, so it should have deleted anything that was not on the source drive. I'm wondering if I should have formatted the drive anyway... I thought cloning it would be enough.

It doesn't seem to be causing any problems, but I don't want to have increasing number of ghost volumes if I do future "clean installs".

 

[Project 2501]

Just a quick follow up! This is less a "solution" and more of a "best practice". Pretty obvious there was no easy fix, so re-cloned Catalina to my boot drive, but this time erasing the volume with Disk Utility first.

The ghost volume and extra recovery volume are gone.

That's what I get for being lazy the first time around.