High sierra won't format new drives

[DannyG776]

I totally agree! This was my first time installing a clean version of High Sierra. I had in the past just been upgrading from Snow Leopard forward. My system was running very sluggish and I feared I had some malware on the computer. My anti virus software did not detect anything but my HD’s seemed to always be maxed out. I have a Mid-2010 Mac Pro with 2 2.4 Xeon processors and over 32 GB of ram. So it should not bog down writing simple word docs or making power points. I do do a lot of video edits in FCX Pro. Now it runs nice and smooth so hopefully it stays that way until some newer parts arrive and I am able to upgrade the processors, video card, and HD’s to SSD’s in the next week or so.

Thanks again for your post,

Dan

 

[stanw]

Did not read through all the thread, though I have had this problem and figured out how to do it. Have formatted many drives, and when choosing ExFat it gives an error, go back to Disk Utility and now the drive shows up on the left side with a different name and appears partially ghosted out, select it again and do it again and this time it works.

 

[garyetaylor]

I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else:

The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it.

It’s only three terminal commands

First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is

View attachment 748212

the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.

open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is:


diskutil unmountDisk force disk3


You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well.
Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number). It will prompt you for your password, so type it in and hit return:


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”

Now you need to partition the disk as Mac os journaled, so run the following command, and again change the disk number where appropriate, and change the name in the quote marks to whatever you want to call your disk:


diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "ENT" 0g



Then you will see the progress as it formats it, then the disk will mount on the desktop and you’re ready to go.

I bought an ssd drive for my late 2013 iMac and realised it was in ntfs, tried everything for format it with no joy, doing this in terminal solved it... Thanks for the info

 

[loekf]

This worked in no time. Thanks.

Except that Western Digital's WD Drive Utils is buggy like hell. I got sick of the endless drive disconnect messages. This is caused by the fact that Western Digital Mybook drives have an internal sleep timer (can be set to 30 or 45 minutes) and macOS sees suddenly a drive disappear and concludes it unmounted unexpectly. For some reason sometimes it goes ok for a while.

Best thing is to disable the internal sleep time and tick macOS "put drive into sleep mode when possible". For time machine drives you should do this anyways.

With the latest version I also ended up with multiple mount points for the same drive.

I recommend to uninstall it after you formatted or disabled the sleep modes.

About formatting external drives, Apple really screwed up here. Usually you get an error that Mediakit reports not enough space on device for requested operation.

Usually external USB drives come NTFS formatted for Windows PCs. However, the EFI partition is too mall (less than 200 MB). macOS' Disk Utility needs at least 200 MB. Windows can work with at least 100 MB.

Command line is the only way to format the drive.

What I did last time:

diskutil list
diskutil listFilesystems

pick the right disk, e.g. disk4

diskutil eraseDisk free /dev/disk4
diskutil eraseDisk free itsfree /dev/disk4
diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk4 GPT JHFS+ '<insert volume name here' 0b

 

[mpainesyd]

loekf - thanks for those command line tips. Worked like a charm.

 

[traysee]

I had many problems with Disk utility on High Sierra, formatting is one of them.
I found out, that most drives I needed to format I can - eventually.

Step 1 is generally eject the drive. Disk utility in HS seems to fail more than succeed in unmounting the drive on their own.
Step 2 - once the drive is ejected, select the greyed out drive in Disk tools and partition or "erase" as you want. Usually, on third or fourth attempt the formatting succeeds and drive is generally OK. Apple file systems are easier to create than others - few days ago I spent 15 minutes creating exFAT from HFS drive.

Kind of nightmare, Sierra Disk utility were quite reliable, why did they have to screw up old functionality is not clear to me.

[doublepost=1523153571][/doublepost]Thank you for this! Thought I was going crazy. Something that used to be so simple was suddenly not working at all. After selecting the "grayed" out drive I was finally able to format it for the MAC. High Sierra - boo!

 

[plr2205]

I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else:

The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it.

It’s only three terminal commands

First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is

View attachment 748212

the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.

open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is:


diskutil unmountDisk force disk3


You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well.
Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number). It will prompt you for your password, so type it in and hit return:


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”

Now you need to partition the disk as Mac os journaled, so run the following command, and again change the disk number where appropriate, and change the name in the quote marks to whatever you want to call your disk:


diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "ENT" 0g



Then you will see the progress as it formats it, then the disk will mount on the desktop and you’re ready to go.

[doublepost=1525057206][/doublepost]Hi, this was looking good but then after this command
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1024 count=1024

i got a "Resource busy" message. Not sure what direction to go now?

 

[meanmean]

[doublepost=1525057206][/doublepost]Hi, this was looking good but then after this command
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1024 count=1024

i got a "Resource busy" message. Not sure what direction to go now?

You might want to copy the output of

diskutil list

, so it's easier for others to see what is going on.

One potential fix is to unmount the disk before dd'ing it, this may resolve your issue:

diskutil unmountDisk disk2

You might also want to double check that neither finder is open to the disk nor a terminal is set to current directory on the disk (could be where you are typing dd from).

Also, you don't need to sudo diskUtil for most commands when working with removable disks. You will need to sudo for dd'ing though.

 

[bz910]

I have attempted both barnyreed's and loekf's commands, and I am still getting the
-69760: Unable to write to the last block of the device
error...
I received this toshiba 1tb drive, it was formatted Exfat. I simply want it to be FAT32 or something that is usable! damn this is frustrating. any other suggestions on formatting? is there a software I can buy that will fix this? at this point, the amount of time I have spent on it is wasted, happy to pay someone to help now, but don't even know where to start for that either.

 

[treekram]

There's some suggestions in the following:
https://forums.crucial.com/t5/Cruci...e-to-the-last-block-of-the-device/ta-p/179139

They're talking about a SSD but the problems they're trying to fix would apply to a HDD as well. There is a Terminal app in Recovery so you can try the same commands that barnyreed and loekf have although not all commands may be available in the Recovery Terminal.

 

[vitalef]

I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else:

The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it.

It’s only three terminal commands

First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is

View attachment 748212

the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.

open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is:


diskutil unmountDisk force disk3


You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well.
Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number). It will prompt you for your password, so type it in and hit return:


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”

Now you need to partition the disk as Mac os journaled, so run the following command, and again change the disk number where appropriate, and change the name in the quote marks to whatever you want to call your disk:


diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "ENT" 0g



Then you will see the progress as it formats it, then the disk will mount on the desktop and you’re ready to go.

I followed all of this and end up with the error... disk2s2 does not appear to be a whole disk
This is a bran new 4tb drive that disk utility failed to format... It seems I'm stuck.
To give you a bit more background, I needed to copy all the content from another 2tb drive to this one as it is failing, I can no longer write to it. The way I did that was with DiskUtility and Restore... Restore from Storage to Storage2... well it named my new disk Storage, copied all the files and apparently also copied the error it's having because the exact same thing was happening with the new drive. I figured Id erase the new drive and then reformat it and then just drag and drop my files... well now it's called disk2s2, and does not mount... is there any way to recover and reformat this bran new drive? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

- Frank

 

[Catwhispers]

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”


I just get permission denied message after entering this?

 

[treekram]

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”


I just get permission denied message after entering this?

Make sure to unmount (eject) the drive you're doing this to (and make sure you have the correct drive before you do this). If you can't eject it via Finder or Disk Utility, you can try "sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3" (or whatever your drive number is).

 

[e46pphkg]

I had this problem today, and lost half a day trying to work it out. Got onto a helpful dude at apple who sorted out the problem, well not the problem, but a fairly easy workaround in terminal. I made notes and am pasting them in below in case they can help anyone else:

The disk has a higher level partition that the High Sierra (disk utility) doesn’t’t know how to delete. So he showed me how to totally erase the disk in Terminal, and then format it.

It’s only three terminal commands

First you need to unmount the NTFS disk, so look in disk utilities to see what device it is

View attachment 748212

the device is called disk3s2, but you just want to call it disk3 (leave out the s2), or disk2, or whatever it is coming up as.

open terminal and enter the code below, changing disk3 to whatever your device is:


diskutil unmountDisk force disk3


You should get something saying “Forced unmount of all volumes on disk3 was successful” if all goes well.
Then you need to totally erase the disk, removing the microsoft higher level partition, so in terminal run the following command (again, replace the disk number with the appropriate number). It will prompt you for your password, so type it in and hit return:


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


You should get a result that looks like this


“1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1048576 bytes transferred in 0.673985 secs (1555785 bytes/sec)”

Now you need to partition the disk as Mac os journaled, so run the following command, and again change the disk number where appropriate, and change the name in the quote marks to whatever you want to call your disk:


diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "ENT" 0g



Then you will see the progress as it formats it, then the disk will mount on the desktop and you’re ready to go.

Running OSX10.15.4 and format 4T WDC keep failing.

iMac2018:~ macuser$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


dd: /dev/rdisk3: Device not configured


1+0 records in


0+0 records out


0 bytes transferred in 0.000055 secs (0 bytes/sec)


iMac2018:~ dannietang$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1024 count=1024


dd: /dev/rdisk3: Device not configured


1+0 records in


0+0 records out


0 bytes transferred in 0.000055 secs (0 bytes/sec)


iMac2018:~ macuser$