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I have a problem with a new re-installation of Catalina. I am getting the following: "Macintosh HD" is locked" Pop-up message on every start up.

After going into disk utility I have the following:

  • Macintosh HD
  • Macintosh HD - Data
  • Macintosh HD - Data - Data

The "Macintosh HD" greyed out and I can't erase it. After googling around for a bit. I decided to try and run Disk utility First Aid in an attempt to unlock the disk. So it hopefully can be erased afterwards.

But the Disk utility First Aid have now run for more then 10 hours. The size of the disk is 500 GB but it still seems incredible slow.

  • Is this normal? Because I am worried it is stuck and will never complete.
  • And is it possible to erase the disk after it has been unlocked?

Here is a screenshot. I am sorry for the picture of a screen quality and the Danish language - But the Mac is stuck in disk utility so can't take a prober screenshot or chance language.

enter image description here

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  • Great question. I’ll try to come back when I’m at my Mac, but I bet others will have ideas. Is it possible you have a backup or do you need to pause and hope to get your files back from this Mac?
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 20:42
  • Oh yea I forgot to add that I have all my important stuff backed up on icloud, so no issue there.
    – BjornL
    Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 20:49
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    iCloud is not a backup. It's a sync of everything. You may be able to get away with not losing your files, you may lose individual app settings - things that aren't sync'd to iCloud. Definitely look setting up Time Machine and have it run continually for better protection.
    – Allan
    Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 23:55
  • My company just provided me with a Macbook Pro for work and I'm having the same "issue". I searched for a bit online but I still didn't fully understand if this is a real issue or just an inconvenience of having that message popup at every login. Do you know the downside of using the OS with this problem? I ask that because everything seems to be working fine and since the computer is not mine I don't have the "authority" to format the disk and reinstall the system. I could ask the IT team for a solution but because of COVID quarantine that would take a while...
    – Thomas H.
    Commented Jun 5, 2020 at 12:16
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    Hi! Did you solve it? My new brand mac book pro is having the sane issue.
    – Nico
    Commented Aug 6, 2020 at 2:34

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I ended up just shutting off the machine. I did a factory reset. Now the reinstall of the OS worked without any problems.

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If you know it's okay to wipe the drive, it is possible without unlocking it.

Since that looks like your boot drive, you'll need to boot into recovery mode first. Instructions for this differ depending on the mac you are using.

However, it usually boils down to:

For Intel-based Macs, restart your Mac and immediately press and hold the Command + R keys until you see an Apple logo or other image. For Apple Silicon Macs, turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button until you see the startup options window. Then click the gear icon labeled “Options” and click “Continue.”

Once in Recovery Mode, from the Utilities menu at the top of the screen, select "Terminal."

In the Terminal, type diskutil list and press Enter. This command will list all disks on your system. Identify the APFS drive you want to wipe by noting its identifier, which should look something like diskXsY, where X and Y are numbers corresponding to the disk and partition, respectively.

Before wiping the drive, you need to unmount it. Use the command diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX, replacing diskX with the appropriate identifier of the drive you want to wipe.

To erase the disk, use the command diskutil eraseDisk APFS 'Macintosh HD' GPT /dev/diskX, again replacing diskX with the correct disk identifier. This command will erase the disk, format it as APFS, and apply a GUID Partition Table (GPT) scheme.

After the process is complete, you can exit Terminal and reboot your Mac, making sure to re-enter recovery mode where you can then install a fresh copy of MacOS on the newly formatted drive.

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