Disk Utility takes forever to erase and reformat. I prepare to erase my exFAT SSD drive in Disk Utility on my Mac. The erasing process takes hours and seems not to end. Why does Disk Utility take so long to erase my external hard drive? What to do if Disk Utility erases taking forever?
The possible reasons for Disk Utility takes so long to erase the external drive include the following:
The partition scheme you choose does not support the size you’re trying to allocate for the file system you set for the drive.
The size of the volume exceeds the volume size limitation of the file system you choose.
Sudden power failure during the last disk formatting.
macOS or Disk Utility bug.
Third-party software conflicts and interference.
It seems that Disk Utility won’t let you erase the hard drive. Have you tried to restart your Mac and reconnect the external hard drive to your Mac? Sometimes system errors may block the Disk Utility from erasing your SSD successfully. A simple re-connection may resolve the problem.
Usually, Disk Utility only takes seconds to erase a hard drive. I’m sure that Disk Utility gets stuck on erasing your drive.
Here are some solutions, try them until you fix the issue.
Run First Aid check your external hard drive
Maybe the hard drive has some errors that interfere itself with being erased.
- Select the drive on the Disk Utility sidebar and click First Aid.
- Click Run on the pop-up and wait for the process to complete.
Manually unmount the drive and then mount it
When erasing a hard drive, Disk Utility will unmount the drive first and mount it to the original state after finishing erasing. If there’s any error when unmounting the drive, Disk Utility will take forever to erase the drive.
- Select the volume on the drive.
- Click Unmount on the toolbar.
- Wait for a moment and click Mount to mount the disk again.
Initialize the external drive in Terminal
When Disk Utility fails to erase a hard drive, you can zero out it in Terminal.
- Open Terminal on your Mac.
- Enter the command below to find the identifier of your drive.
diskutil list - Enter the following command to start erasing the external drive. You should replace /dev/disk2 with the device identifier of the external disk.
diskutil zeroDisk /dev/disk2 - Wait for the disk initialization process to end and quit Terminal.
Now, back to Disk Utility and erase the drive again.
Update macOS
If you still get stuck on erasing the hard drive in Disk Utility, go to update your Mac. Update macOS will debug the errors in the current system that may cause your disk formatting process so long.
Whether you erase your whole SSD or a volume on it? If you erase the whole drive, you’re suggested to use the GUID Partition Map no matter which file system you choose. GUID Partition Map is supported on modern macOS and Windows and GUID is designed to overcome the limitations of MBR.
I’ve tried to reconnect my drive and restart my Mac, but no luck.
I fixed the issue by zeroing out the drive using Terminal, thanks a lot!
I want to erase the entire drive.