I was getting the error -69825 whenever I tried to wipe. so it’s uninitialized and I’m unable to format it. I’ve attempted using recovery mode, but the issue persists.
Its drive was previously NTFS and could be mounted on my Mac; but, when I attempted to format it into exfat, Mac journaled, or apfs, I received the same problem, and as a result, I am unable to mount or set up a partition map on my external drive. I attempted to set the drive’s partition map to GUID when I erased it, but the error -69825 remained.
Help me! I’ve spent a lot of time trying to solve this problem and have tried more than five erases, which take longer to erase but still result in the same error. Thanks a lot in advance.
You can also try to erase the external hard drive in Terminal. And you should force unmount the drive in Terminal. Here’s how:
Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder on Mac.
Type diskutil list and hit Enter.
Note down the identifier of your drive, such as disk2.
Execute diskutil unmountDisk disk_identifier to unmount your disk.
Then enter diskutil eraseDisk file_system name disk_identifier to erase it.
Besides, you can try to format the drive on another computer, and make sure it is not encrypted.
When Disk Utility won’t let you erase the hard drive, you can try to First Aid it, then try to erase it again. Next, open the Terminal and run commands diskutil eraseDisk file_system name disk_identifier to erase it. Besides, you can boot the Mac into macOS Recovery Mode and Safe Mode to perform the formatting. If unluckily, all these attempts fail, the drive could be severely damaged, try to send it to a local repair or replace a new one.