How do I delete everything off my external hard drive?

Wiping Your Old External Hard Drive

1. Connect your external hard drive to your computer.
2. Open your Disk Utility App.
3. Select the drive you want to wipe clean (just to be sure you don’t erase the wrong hard drive, disconnect any other external hard drives and double-check that the correct drive is selected)
4. Click Erase.

How do I reset my external hard drive Mac?

How to format an external drive in OS X

1. Connect the drive to the Mac.
2. Open Disk Utility.
3. Select the drive you want to format.
4. Click Erase.
5. Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings: OS X Extended format and GUID partition map.
6. Click Erase and OS X will format the drive.

How do you erase your hard drive on a Mac?

How to Wipe a Mac With an M1 Chip

1. Turn on your Mac and continue to press and hold the power button until the startup options window comes up.
2. When the Utilities window appears, select Disk Utility.
3. In the sidebar, choose Macintosh HD.
4. Click the “Erase” button, then select a file system format and enter a name for it.

How do you wipe a Mac hard drive?

Does a factory reset clean the hard drive?

During the factory resetting process, your PC’s hard drive is completely erased and you lose any business, financial and personal files that may be present on the computer. Once the resetting process starts, you cannot interrupt it.

How do you erase a Mac hard drive?

Erase the Hard Drive. Start your Mac and hold down the Command + R key combination. That brings up OS X Utilities. Select Disk Utility and click Continue. Select the local drive and click the Erase tab, Format should be set to Mac OS Extended (journaled), the click the Erase button. That will erase all data and reformat the hard disk.

How do I format an external hard drive on a Mac?

1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac. 2) Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”. 3) Select the drive you want to format. 4) Click the Partition tab. 6) Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.

Does reformatting a hard drive erase everything?

Reformatting does not completely erase all traces of files from a hard drive but, so far, no viruses are known to be able to recover from a reformat.