Brute force format drive w/ Terminal?

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Brute force format drive w/ Terminal?

I have an Intel iMac. I have two drives I want to erase, but Disk Utility won't let me erase them (one is a Windows NT volume, the other is 1/2 of an old RAID volume).

I have very little Unix experience. What is the easiest way to reformat these two drives using the built-in Terminal commands?

iBook 12 2004

Posted on May 15, 2007 8:46 PM

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Answer 1

j.v.

Level 5

4,155 points

May 16, 2007 7:21 AM in response to Navarro Parker -

from an admin-enabled account, in Terminal.app, see whether
sudo diskutil reformat {volume name goes here}
will work for you or not.

Other possible diskutil options can be seen by simply typing diskutil, with no qualifiers, at the command prompt

Also, man diskutil will give you the "unabridged" version of diskutil's help, complete with several examples.

Lastly, you might want to do a
sudo ls -dl {volume name goes here}
to check and see who "owns" the drives, and what are their read/write permissions, and change them appropriately, e.g.,
sudo chown root {volume name goes here} and
sudo chmod 1775 {volume name goes here}

(the volume name of a secondary drive will be /Volumes/whateverYouNamedIt)

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