Can I stop a disk erase in Disk Utility?

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Level 1

23 points

Can I stop a disk erase in Disk Utility?

I started to erase a 500GB external drive almost an hour ago. I just wanted a simple erase, no security options. I didn't check how those options were set and it must have been set to overwrite (I did use the security options some months ago; probably the last time I formatted a drive). At the rate this is progressing, I'm not sure it's going to be done until some time tomorrow!

MacBook Pro 15" (late 2006; 2,2), Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Sep 10, 2010 5:31 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

rdosh Author

Level 1

23 points

Sep 11, 2010 8:53 AM in response to Hazem Malek

I should have been a little more specific. I was trying to stop the erase so that I could reset the options and start over. I was a little fearful of forcing Disk Utility to quit but that's what I had to do. I was then able to start the erase over again. However, that disk won't eject now and Disk Utility is hung up after I relaunched it to verify that disk.

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Answer 2

rdosh Author

Level 1

23 points

Sep 11, 2010 9:47 AM in response to rdosh

I just forced DU to quit. Didn't really want to do that but did it anyway.

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

53,315 points

Sep 10, 2010 7:27 PM in response to rdosh

Yes.

If you still want to erase with a single pass of zero, just start over.

If you no longer want to erase and just want to put a new file system on the disk, then specify no zeroing options.

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Answer 4

Sep 10, 2010 9:35 PM in response to rdosh

In Disk Utility, look for Security Options button under the Erase pane, click it and choose the first radio button from above which says "Don't Erase Data", that's the quick with least security option as it deleted only the entries in the volume's directory leaving the actual data on the storage media but marked to the OS as free so could be over written with activity over time and also most popular Data Recovery software based solutions can easily recover this kind of erased data.

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