
Select Disk Utility from this window and try erasing or reformatting your drive again.

You should see a macOS Utilities window appear. Recovery Mode appears as a Utilities window. Keep holding both keys until you see an Apple logo or hear a startup sound.

When you’re ready to boot into Recovery Mode, restart your Mac and hold Cmd + R while it boots up. You should back up your Mac before trying to erase or reformat it. Recovery Mode is a special partition on your Mac you can use to restore from a backup, reinstall macOS, get online support, or erase your startup disk. It’s not usually possible to erase the startup disk because your Mac is using it to run macOS. The startup disk is the main hard drive on your computer: the one that stores macOS and all your data. If you’re trying to reformat or erase the startup disk on your Mac, you need to boot into Recovery Mode first. Boot Into Recovery Mode to Erase Your Startup Disk The length of time First Aid takes to run depends on the size of your drive, how much data is on it, and how many errors need fixing.Ĭombine this step with the previous one to run First Aid on the parent device for your drive, as well as the individual Volumes. At the top of the window, click the First Aid button, then agree to Run First Aid. Open Disk Utility and select the drive you want to erase from the sidebar. When you run First Aid, it scans the entire disk for errors and lets you know if there are any it can’t repair. Run First Aid to Repair Your Drive Before Erasing Itĭisk Utility has a First Aid feature that fixes all kinds of issues related to your drives: slow performance, corrupt files, or unexpected behavior.

Take note that when you erase a device, it erases all the Volumes contained within it as well. Select the parent folder for the drive you want to reformat or erase, then click the Erase button again. You should see the device names for each of your drives appear in the sidebar. Open Disk Utility and select View > Show All Devices from the menu bar. A Volume is the partition or section of a drive you store data in. Show All Devices and Erase the Parent Driveīy default, Disk Utility only shows the Volumes on your connected drives, rather than the drives themselves. Use the steps below to fix it and let us know in the comments which one worked for you. You’re probably reading this article because the Erase button was grayed out when you tried to erase or reformat a drive using Disk Utility. What if the Erase Button in Disk Utility is grayed Out?
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Feel free to skip this section if you already know how to do it. Let’s start with a brief explanation of the correct way to reformat or erase drives using your Mac. How to erase or reformat a Drive using Disk Utility

Show All Devices and Erase the Parent Drive
