Doing a manual disk format on Mac OS X

I found that the disk utility that is usually used while formatting hard drives works most of the times but has certain issues when you are trying to format Drives that have an existing windows partition. I havent been able to really pin point the issue, but in those cases the only way to format the drive is doing a manual format.

So ... how do you format a drive manually on Mac OS?

First of all, you need to have root access and need to do a sudo:

type

sudo sh

Then press ENTER ( you will get a prompt for the root password, go ahead)

Once you do that, then you will probably need to get a list of the available drives on the system.

type

diskutil list

Then press ENTER (you will get something similar to the image below)

Basically the command will give you a listing of all your drives, take note of the NAME of the drive you want to format which will be needed on the final and most important step.

Ok, so now you have the name of the drive you want to format, I suppose I dont need to warn you about what you are trying to do, any information stored on the drive will be completely wiped out and you will have a fresh clean new drive.

You are supposed to be under sudo to run the command.

The format command is:

diskutil eraseDisk "Journaled HFS+" name disk3

(where disk3 is the name of the drive you want to format)

Thats all =)

Felipe

Comments

[Cheap Computers Canada]

Then you sure need a back up because at times you can even press the wrong key and everything goes kaput.