Usually, Disk Utility only takes seconds to erase a hard drive. I’m sure that Disk Utility gets stuck on erasing your drive.
Here are some solutions, try them until you fix the issue.
Run First Aid check your external hard drive
Maybe the hard drive has some errors that interfere itself with being erased.
When erasing a hard drive, Disk Utility will unmount the drive first and mount it to the original state after finishing erasing. If there’s any error when unmounting the drive, Disk Utility will take forever to erase the drive.
When Disk Utility fails to erase a hard drive, you can zero out it in Terminal.
Whether erase your whole SSD or a volume on it? If you erase the whole drive, you’re suggested to use the GUID Partition Map no matter which file system you choose. GUID Partition Map is supported on modern macOS and Windows and GUID is designed to overcome the limitations of MBR.
Here are some solutions, try them until you fix the issue.
Run First Aid check your external hard drive
Maybe the hard drive has some errors that interfere itself with being erased.
- Select the drive on the Disk Utility sidebar and click First Aid.
- Click Run on the pop-up and wait for the process to complete.
When erasing a hard drive, Disk Utility will unmount the drive first and mount it to the original state after finishing erasing. If there’s any error when unmounting the drive, Disk Utility will take forever to erase the drive.
- Select the volume on the drive.
- Click Unmount on the toolbar.
- Wait for a moment and click Mount to mount the disk again.
When Disk Utility fails to erase a hard drive, you can zero out it in Terminal.
- Open Terminal on your Mac.
- Enter the command below to find the identifier of your drive.
diskutil list - Enter the following command to start erasing the external drive. You should replace /dev/disk2 with the device identifier of the external disk.
diskutil zeroDisk /dev/disk2 - Wait for the disk initialization process to end and quit Terminal.
Whether erase your whole SSD or a volume on it? If you erase the whole drive, you’re suggested to use the GUID Partition Map no matter which file system you choose. GUID Partition Map is supported on modern macOS and Windows and GUID is designed to overcome the limitations of MBR.