can't format external hard drive in high sierra

Bought an external hard drive and every time I try to format it through disk utility I get "erase process has failed". I've tried formatting it to exfat, APFS and even ms-dos and I keep getting the same error. I had no trouble formatting my external hard drives in older operating systems. I know their is nothing wrong with my external hard drive because it works on my PC. This all started when I installed High Sierra.

What can be done

thank you

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11), 12gb or ram

Posted on Dec 8, 2017 8:17 AM

Top-ranking reply

ByronBound

Level 1

35 points

Posted on Dec 19, 2017 10:25 AM

Hi mate

Yeah its stupid really. Apple have removed the actual disk drives from the display. You will see a "View" option - click this and select the option to display the actual drives. Then select the physical drive you want to format and it will work.

Apple are too busy building their palace to get even the basics right these days...

View in context

32 replies

Feb 6, 2018 6:06 PM in response to Eau Rouge

Thanks! I have no idea why that's not the default view anymore. This worked perfect.

Dec 19, 2017 10:27 AM in response to macgvyer987

In the Utility select the View option to display the actual drives. They used to be displayed in the previous versions of the utility but Apple, for some stupid reason I can't fathom, has removed them from the default display. Once you can see the disks you can format them.

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can't format external hard drive in high sierra