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<blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1926224" data-attributes="member: 396914">Don't do that. Don't partition. That divides the hardware up and basically could erase the entire drive in the process.From your image, &quot;Bob&quot; is the system drive, as I suspected. You cannot write to &quot;Bob&quot; because it is owned by the system and NO user has access to it. But, &quot;Bob - Data&quot; is also part of that drive and you CAN write to it. Not only that, but the space that you think Bob has is also available to Bob-Data. How that works is that &quot;Container Disk3&quot; has the entire drive (hardware) available, then within that Container are two Volumes, as Apple calls them, &quot;Bob&quot; and &quot;Bob-Data.&quot; As I said, Bob has the system and is very strongly write protected. The good news is that &quot;Bob&quot; is relatively small and doesn't consume a ton of space. &quot;Bob-Data&quot; is another Volume, and it holds the /User folder in which your own account space was when it was a boot drive. That Volume is read/write, and there should be a folder on it for your account when it was boot, which you may be able to write to. The way APFS works is that all the volumes in a container have access to all the space in the container that is free, so both Bob and Bob-Data have access, as I said, to the free space on the drive.Now, if you never plan to boot from that drive, ever, you can try to remove the volume named &quot;Bob&quot; by selecting it and then click on the &quot;-&quot; on the bar where it says &quot;Volume.&quot; I don't know if that will work, and it won't save you much space, but if it does, &quot;Bob&quot; will disappear and only &quot;Bob-Data&quot; will remain.BTW, one of the &quot;smarts&quot; of the OS is that when you boot from that drive, the system will mount what you have highlighted, namely, &quot;Bob volumes,&quot; both Bob and Bob-data get mounted, then merged into one virtual drive named &quot;Bob.&quot; On that virtual drive, you can write to /Users, but not the other root folders because they are the system files stored on Bob, while /Users is stored on Bob-data.Hope that helped. To summarize, just use Bob-Data instead of Bob and you should be able to write to the drive.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="MacInWin, post: 1926224, member: 396914"] Don't do that. Don't partition. That divides the hardware up and basically could erase the entire drive in the process. From your image, "Bob" is the system drive, as I suspected. You cannot write to "Bob" because it is owned by the system and NO user has access to it. But, "Bob - Data" is also part of that drive and you CAN write to it. Not only that, but the space that you think Bob has is also available to Bob-Data. How that works is that "Container Disk3" has the entire drive (hardware) available, then within that Container are two Volumes, as Apple calls them, "Bob" and "Bob-Data." As I said, Bob has the system and is very strongly write protected. The good news is that "Bob" is relatively small and doesn't consume a ton of space. "Bob-Data" is another Volume, and it holds the /User folder in which your own account space was when it was a boot drive. That Volume is read/write, and there should be a folder on it for your account when it was boot, which you may be able to write to. The way APFS works is that all the volumes in a container have access to all the space in the container that is free, so both Bob and Bob-Data have access, as I said, to the free space on the drive. Now, if you never plan to boot from that drive, ever, you can try to remove the volume named "Bob" by selecting it and then click on the "-" on the bar where it says "Volume." I don't know if that will work, and it won't save you much space, but if it does, "Bob" will disappear and only "Bob-Data" will remain. BTW, one of the "smarts" of the OS is that when you boot from that drive, the system will mount what you have highlighted, namely, "Bob volumes," both Bob and Bob-data get mounted, then merged into one virtual drive named "Bob." On that virtual drive, you can write to /Users, but not the other root folders because they are the system files stored on Bob, while /Users is stored on Bob-data. Hope that helped. To summarize, just use Bob-Data instead of Bob and you should be able to write to the drive. [/QUOTE]

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