Understanding partitions;Fear of tampering
Im reformating my macbook and trying to do a factory reset.
This process has been wiping my hard drive-> reinstalling monterey.
I just want to understand my drives and make sure and malicious tampering is not in play. Ive had my system accessed once physically and it has been slowed down/strange ever since.
Im not paranoid to say that i might have some complex efi bootkit. But id rather be safe than sorry:
1)I have an apple disk image, which holds the mac os base system. Clearly i cant format this partition. However just want to check if it is sound:
(Location:External)
2) My HD partition has a constant undeclared ‘Other Volumes’ partition that generates everytime i erase the drive. This takes up 146mb always on the dot. Under the container header this partition is defined as ‘3 not mounted’ volumes. In the sub headers, my Macintosh HD and Data, this value is listed as ‘Other Volumes’.
Are these normal file systems that are installed every time the drive is erased, or is something amiss?
All in all, i would prefer to wipe my physically drive completely, and use the firmware internet OS recovery to reinstall my system
I cannot format my physical disk(SSD) from the recovery-> disk utility tool. So otherwise, how can i do clear my whole drive completely. Is this only possible through single user mode/command line?
I understand cleaning out the physical drive is not a risk ad mac’s built in EFI will automatically download an internet recovery tool.