Can't unmount drive from internet recovery

[Verge]

Title sums it up. I've tried everything, i just want to format my mac mini. This is pretty ludicrous. How do i stop whatever is on the boot drive so I can format it? There is only a single drive in this mini, wont' unmount through the utility or through diskutil in terminal.

I just want to use my mac !!!

 

[Gav2k]

Just repartition the drive and format. That's all you need to do. You can unmount because the internet recovery is running from it.

 

[Verge]

Just repartition the drive and format. That's all you need to do. You can unmount because the internet recovery is running from it.

I can't repartition it because it won't unmount. Can't reformat because it's in use/won't unmount.

It's a catch-22. I guess if the internet restore is running off the drive that kind of make sense, but how on earth are you ever supposed to do a clean install over the net? I guess it's USB or nothing?

I got frustrated and popped an SSD in last night, don't have time for such nonsense.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:

You are finding out why a wise Mac user ALWAYS keeps on-hand a second, external, fully bootable drive. It can be a clone of the internal drive, or just ANY drive that has a bootable copy of the OS on it.

Do this, and tasks such as a reinitialization and/or restoration of the internal drive become easy-as-pie ...

 

[Weaselboy]

Title sums it up. I've tried everything, i just want to format my mac mini. This is pretty ludicrous. How do i stop whatever is on the boot drive so I can format it? There is only a single drive in this mini, wont' unmount through the utility or through diskutil in terminal.

I just want to use my mac !!!

Just to clarify, are you in recovery or Internet recovery?

Internet recovery is a command-option-r boot and downloads the recovery utility into memory so you can completely format the drive without getting that error.

If you did a command-r recovery, that is running off the drive based recovery partition and will cause the error you mentioned.