You will often receive the message "Erase process has failed.
How to fix the 'Erase process has failed' error on Mac? If you are experiencing the "erase process has failed on mac" error while formatting external hard drives on MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs, read on to get it resolved.
Try to boot from a USB installer to format your drive or forcibly erase the Mac hard drive in Terminal using the steps detailed in the next section. Suppose formatting in Internet Recovery Mode is not helpful. Once you boot into Internet Recovery, follow the same procedure to erase the Mac hard drive as in Recovery mode. It allows your Mac to contact Apple's Internet Recovery server for the disk image to boot your Mac into recovery mode.Īlthough the extra process for downloading the disk image (the latest macOS compatible with your Mac) takes time, many users managed to erase the Mac hard drive when it failed in Recovery Mode. Internet Recovery Mode is similar to the standard Recovery mode, only that it doesn't rely on the recovery partition to access Disk Utility. Solution 2: Format the drive in Internet Recovery Mode If you can't erase Macintosh HD, follow solution 2 to format it in Internet Recovery Mode. Once First Aid completes, try to format the drive again. Click First Aid at the top, then hit Run.ĭepending on your drive size, amount of data on it, the potential number of errors, the time First Aid takes for a diagnosis varies.Launch Disk Utility and select your Mac hard drive from the left sidebar.Running First Aid to repair Mac hard drive could potentially fix errors that stop Disk Utility from erasing it. Solution 1: Repair the startup disk with Disk Utility First Aidįirst Aid is often used to scan the whole disk for errors relevant to the directory structure and formatting, then repairs it automatically. Format the drive in Internet Recovery Mode Repair the startup disk with Disk Utility First Aid But if that's your case, here are the solutions you can try. It's rare to see Disk Utility can't erase Macintosh HD in Recovery Mode. What to do when Disk Utility can't erase Macintosh HD? Nevertheless, If Disk Utility still can't erase the Mac hard drive, please repair it with First Aid. But, if you did choose the volume and still failed, you can click View > Show All Devices to display all the drives, then erase the drive itself to see if it succeeds. We recommend you erase the volume but not the entire disk to avoid the "Secure Disk Erase Failed - Couldn't Unmount Disk" error. Then keep the Scheme as GUID Partition Map.
You may fail to format your Mac hard drive or an external hard drive when the erase button is grayed out on Mac Disk Utility or when you receive the "Erase process has failed" error message.
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