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So I have spent the last five hours trying to make this work, please bear with me.Essentially, I have a Mac Mini with two drives. The internal drive (slow as ****) is used as an internal Time Machine backup disk since it has lots of space and it's too slow to run macOS as the primary boot drive. I also have an SSD attached via USB to the Mini that is used as the boot drive. It contains the bootable version of macOS that I use for that machine, and it backs up to that internal HDD.The problem is that the SSD is HSF+ (Mac OS X Extended Journaled) and Catalina wants APFS. Note that this drive is a direct clone of the previous system that ran on the internal HDD since there was important data that needed to be migrated and I didn't have access to a large enough external disk for a backup at the time. This means that the system, as a whole, was never on APFS. Yet, somehow, Mojave ran just fine on HSF+.Now here's where the real trouble is: knowing I have a recent Time Machine backup, I went ahead and attempted to wipe the boot drive. I did so from internet recovery, where I found that there isn't an option for APFS on that machine. It's simply not there — not grayed out, but not even on the list of options for erasure. Yet, on my MacBook, I'm able to format it as APFS just fine. Doing so and plugging the drive into the Mini starts a hellish cycle of the Mini not recognizing the disk and therefore not allowing it to be used to restore a backup to. It simply says "cannot erase disk" each time I attempt to restore the Time Machine backup when it's APFS, whereas if I reformat it to HSF+ it works just fine. At this point I've tried formatting it on two different machines. On my Macbook, I attempted it from Disk Utility on the boot system and from recovery. No dice. I've also tried running disk repair on both devices, and it comes up clean every time. Still no dice. I attempted running SUM and using `fsck -fy`, but no dice. I've also attempted using `diskutil` to convert it to APFS. This brings me to my next point.At one point I realized that Disk Utility has a built-in option to convert HSF+ to APFS, so I tried that. It worked from recovery on my Macbook, but not on the regular system. On the Mini the option does not even exist. I then attempted to make this conversion from the recovery terminal on both devices but the commands which would have worked pre-HS are nonexistant and thus invalid. I'm at my wits end. All I wanted to do was put Catalina on that drive. I've tried every guide, every support article, and I've watched an entire season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the process. What I need is for the Catalina installer to stop telling me that it needs an APFS drive and start giving me the option to convert it without all this hassle, like the installer for High Sierra did. And due to the extreme lack of space I have on each and every of my Mac-based drives, I can't make a High Sierra installer, so please don't suggest that.Please tell me I'm not the only one facing this nightmare. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.