How to Erase or Format a Mac Hard Drive via Command Line

For those of you looking to format an entire disk and remove all partitions here is the command: diskutil eraseDisk free itsfree /dev/disk6

I'm going to show you how to locate the disk you want to erase, unmount that disk, and then erase that disk in a particular format.

It seems that my 128Gig SanDisk memory card has an internal write protection on and I cant erase anything on it. My MAC disk utility wont work.

To erase a disk from the command line on the Mac, we'll use the familiar “diskutil” command with the eraseDisk verb and other appropriate flags ...

In Disk Utility on Mac, you can erase and reformat storage devices to use with your Mac. Erasing a storage device deletes everything on it.

This guide will walk through how to erase and format an entire target disk using exclusively the command line on any Mac using macOS or Mac OS X.

To format a disk using Terminal, you must enter the correct command. The most basic one is - diskutil eraseDisk.

Step 1: Open Disk Utility · Step 2: Choose the Volume · Step 3: Select the File System and Scheme · Step 4: Confirm Formatting. Steps To Format a Hard Drive... · Formatting HDDs and SSDs...

If you are having trouble with the Disk Utility App for erasing or formatting a drive, you can try using the Command Line in Terminal to ...