How do I access these 3 hidden volumes?

Question

The following image shows my Disk Utility window.

It says there are 5 volumes in total, but I can only access two: Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD - Data. Apparently one of them is a Virtual Machine as denoted by the VM. Another one of them is Recovery, but I do not know what this means exactly. The final volume is not mounted; it does not even mount after I click the Mount button.

Is there a way possibly through terminal or Recovery mode in where I can access them and determine if they are useful or not? I am running macOS Catalina on my 2015 iMac if that helps.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

A typical APFS volume under Catalina will have 5 partitions.

• Macintosh HD: the read-only volume that stores the OS
• Macintosh HD - Data: the 'normal' everyday volume where you save stuff to.
• Preboot: a small amount of data used ... before booting.
• Recovery: the Recovery volume that you boot to when holding Command R
• VM: caches for virtual memory.

These are all essential, and you should not need to access them or do anything else with them.