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Force erase an external HD?

I was wondering about my options to "force erase" an external drive.


I have a 2T external, portable SEAGATE drive. It crashed, likely when I carelessly unplugged it. I used it as my TimeMachine drive. I don't need the data on it anymore. I used DiskUtil. It kinda works: the drive shows in Finder, but hangs when I try to write to it. Now it is stuck in "Reading partition size limits.


I was wondering if there is a blunt tool (i.e. in terminal) to "force erase" the drive and/or run a hardware diagnosis to see if the drive can be salvaged?


Thank you

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Apr 30, 2020 5:04 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Apr 30, 2020 8:02 PM

Make sure you are erasing the physical drive and not a volume or container. With recent versions of macOS you need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility.


You can try checking the health of the hard drive by running DriveDX. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to allow the necessary communication to the external drive. However, not all external drives allow the necessary communication even when using the special USB driver. Post the complete report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Apr 30, 2020 8:02 PM in response to JimKnopf128

Make sure you are erasing the physical drive and not a volume or container. With recent versions of macOS you need to click on "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drive appears in the left pane of Disk Utility.


You can try checking the health of the hard drive by running DriveDX. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to allow the necessary communication to the external drive. However, not all external drives allow the necessary communication even when using the special USB driver. Post the complete report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.


May 1, 2020 6:57 PM in response to JimKnopf128

That is weird since it says the Drive supports SMART, but doesn't list any SMART Attributes or allow you to run the selftest. It's possible the drive doesn't really support SMART or part of it is being blocked by the drive's USB controller. I wouldn't trust the DriveDX results here at least for this particular drive.


If you still have the special USB driver installed, try accessing the SMART information from the command line using the Terminal app.


Within the Terminal begin typing this (make sure there is at least one space after "sudo ":

sudo  


Now drag & drop the DriveDX app onto the Terminal window so it auto fills the correct path to the app, then continue typing the following (press the delete key to remove the extra space as you need to extend the path":

/Contents/Resources/smartctl  -a  -s  on  /dev/diskN  |  tee  ~/Desktop/drivedx-results.txt


Where I wrote "/dev/diskN" you need to substitute the correct drive identifier for your drive. Use DriveDX to get this information. In the report you provided the drive identifier for your drive at the time of the report was "disk3". This drive identifier may change next time you connect the drive so check it before executing the command.


At the end of the line press the "Return" key to execute the command. Besides displaying the results on the Terminal window it will also create a "drivedx-results.txt" file on your Desktop with the same information shown on the Terminal window. Post the results from the "drivedx-results.txt" file here like you did with the original DriveDX report.


The final command will appear something like this (I used "disk3" as an example since it was in your original DriveDx report):

sudo  /Users/hwtech/Downloads/DriveDx.app/Contents/Resources/smartctl  -a  -s  on /dev/disk3


Edit: If you have a Windows PC you can instead try checking the SMART attributes using GSmartControl (there is a portable version that doesn't require an install). Post the full report here as you did before.

Force erase an external HD?

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