I got locked out of disk I encrypted via OS X cause I forgot the password. I don’t care about the contents, I simply want to use the disk again and I know there is a command line via terminal to do this but don’t know what it is.
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Bryan
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How Do I Wipe Out an Encrypted Disk?
Comments: 8 Responses to “How Do I Wipe Out an Encrypted Disk?”
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So the way to do this is to first use Terminal to get a list of volumes connected to your Mac. You'll need to figure out what this drive is called in order to reformat it. The command for this is:
diskutil list
Now this will show your internal drive and any other drives connected. You've got to look through that list carefully and figure out which one is the disk you want to reformat. The SIZE column is key for this. For instance if you have a 500GB internal drive, and the drive you want to reformat is a 1GB USB Flash drive, then they are easy to tell apart.
So the path to the drive is what you want. For instance, it may look like this:
/dev/disk5
Now, if you are absolutely sure that this is the drive you want to erase, you can do it using this:
diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ untitled XXXXX
And replace the XXXXX with the path to the drive, such as /dev/disk5
That should do it. I would then use Disk Utility to reformat it again for good measure, and with a name you want.
It worked! Thanks Gary. But now I have a problem. I do need to format it but when I go into disk utility the partition section of the disk is greyed out.
Not sure. Could be you are trying to use a format that doesn't support partitions. Try different things. Play around with it.
So I tried everything I could from backing up, to encrypting to running disk utility and I always get the same error message "The given file system is not supported on Core Storage. Any thoughts, Gary?
Are you formatting it as HFS+?
Why do you need to partition the drive?
terminal: diskutil cs list
diskutil coreStorage delete lvgUUID
Delete a CoreStorage logical volume group. All logical volumes will be removed.
Henrik Denmark
Hi Gary, I tried Henrik Denmarks
terminal: diskutil cs list
diskutil coreStorage delete lvgUUID
Delete a CoreStorage logical volume group. All logical volumes will be removed.
But I get the following message after it "Ownership of the affected disk is required." So I am still unable to wipe my disk. PLease help!
Not sure what to tell you. Clearly there is something different about that drive that I don't know about. Best to get it in front of an expert who can examine it.