Each “parent” drive is a separate physical drive, while each little drive icon below it is a partition on that drive. This annoyingly leaves out empty hard drives, but click Views > Show All Devices in the menu bar and you’ll see a tree of drives and their internal partitions. RELATED: How to Show Empty, Unformatted Drives in Disk Utility on macOS
On the left side of the window you’ll see all mounted volumes. Partition Drives and Format Partitionsĭisk Utility shows internal drives and connected external drives (like USB drives), as well as special image files (DMG files) that you can mount and access as drives. This allows you to use Disk Utility to wipe your entire drive-or repartition it. In Recovery Mode, macOS runs a special sort of recovery environment.
