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Why is the Erase button grayed out in Disc Utility?

I'm trading in my iMac and want to delete and reformat the hard drive. I'm following instruction for using Disc Utility to do this but the Erase button is grayed out and will not allow me to erase the disc. How do I erase and reformat?


Posted on Oct 7, 2019 10:42 AM

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Posted on Oct 7, 2019 10:49 AM

Because you need to be in the Recovery Partition to do an erase on the internal HD. Boot into Recovery by holding down the Command + R key on startup, then open Disk Utility.

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Why is the Erase button grayed out in Disc Utility?

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