Disk Utility shows what you need to use when creating and working with storage volumes on different disks.(period or full stop) to show hidden items, but that is at best a temporary measure, and still doesn’t reveal full detail. You can always make it a bit more literal by pressing Command-Shift. The Finder shows you a simplified view which you need for everyday handling of documents, apps, etc.There are three different ways of looking at the disks and volumes on your Mac, which don’t always precisely match: This article aims to unravel that so that you can better understand the Finder, Disk Utility, and the command line across each recent version of macOS.

Now with Catalina and its strange paired System and Data volumes, it just seems a bewildering mess. Then came High Sierra and Mojave with APFS, which complicated that with features like containers, and the simple illusion offered in the Finder didn’t bear much resemblance to what Disk Utility shows, and is further removed from Terminal’s shell. What we saw in the Finder and in Disk Utility was reasonably close to what we needed to use, and wasn’t too far from what you’d find using the diskutil command in Terminal.

It’s important to keep in mind that if you run the eraseDisk command, the target disk is going to lose all its data, so make sure you are erasing the proper disk.Until Apple introduced APFS, the normal structure of our Mac’s disks and volumes was relatively simple. The syntax is going to look like this: Diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Empty /dev/disk5s2 Let’s say the disk I want to erase has “/dev/disk5s2” as its identifier and I’m going to use Mac OS Extended Journaled (JHFS+) as the system format type and name it “Empty”. This is the syntax we need: Diskutil eraseDisk FILESYSTEM DISKNAME DISKIDENTIFIER Then pick a name and a system format type. Once you have found the proper drive to erase, just copy its identifier so you can use it for the next command. This is going to list all the mounted drives on your Mac. Start off by running the following command in the command line: Diskutil list Here I'll show you how you can erase and format a disk using the command line.

To do that, the only thing you need is a bit of precise syntax to make sure that you are erasing the proper disk. But some Mac users might need to erase them from the command line on Mac OS. Most users use Disk Utility to erase a disk or hard drive.

Mac os disk utility terminal