the startup volume, by default on the internal disk named Macintosh HD, which forms the root of the boot file system,.Within the latter are a minimum of four APFS volumes: I will detail those for release versions of Big Sur in an article next week Catalina and pre-release versions of Big Sur are detailed in this article.Ī standard APFS boot disk in High Sierra and Mojave consists of an EFI partition and the main APFS container.
Within the System and Data volumes, standard folders/directories also have fixed layouts, with firmlinks to bind those two volumes together. This article summarises all you need to know about the layout of volumes on APFS boot disks from High Sierra through to Big Sur, running on both Intel and M1 Macs. When you format a disk and install macOS on it, making it a startup or boot volume, it has a standard structure, something that has changed greatly over the last few years.
