Unable to erase Mac Hard Drive

I'm not sure what the problem is with it - when the mac logs in, after a few seconds everything goes haywire and starts disappearing - you can see the icons on the screen but if you click on apps or utilities you can open something, and then all of the m disappear and the mac freezes with the spinning ball.

In recovery mode I have tried erasing the disk but it doesn't work.
 
If I try just installing Monteray, from recovery mode, it goes so far, gets to 12 minutes remaining and says an error occurred loading the update.
 
Looks like I'll have to bin this computer, just cannot get the bloody thing to erase. This is why I cannot stand Apple Computers, so unintuitive! On Windows it'd be a breeze to diagnose a faulty Hard Drive. Absolutely no idea which genius thought it was a good idea to spam drives with apfs containers and all that ridiculousness!
 
visibleman said:
What model of iMac (assuming that from pics) have you got?
And what's the current MacOS version installed? Is it 12 Monterey?

I agree, Mac's can be a royal pain especially when it's drive related as you haven't got physical access to the drive.


What error(s) did it show when you attempted to erase the entire disk (using Disk Utility in Recovery)?


As said, if you can make a MacOS USB installer then do so as it's quite easy to bodge the drive.

But assuming you're using MacOS 10.12/10.13 (Sierra or High Sierra)+ and disk0 (double check with diskutil list beforehand) is your SSD/system drive, then try -
Code: 
sudo diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk0
sudo diskutil erasedisk apfs "Drive Name Here" gpt /dev/disk0

Alternatively or MacOS is below 10.12 then -
Code: 
sudo diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk0
sudo diskutil erasedisk JHFS+ "Drive Name Here" gpt /dev/disk0

Bodged partition table, look at the gpt command, or an issue with the T1/T2 firmware, can be revived but need another Mac, are other possibilities but i haven't personally experienced those so will require a bit of Googling.
And Apple Stack Exchange and/or the Apple community forum are worth a look as someone may be able to shed some light on the 69614 error.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. There isn't anything on the Hard Drive which needs saving, it's ok to format and install afresh - I did install Mac OS off a USB once, can't remember how I did it though - I think there was a website where you could download various Mac Operating Systems onto a USB and load them, would you happen to know?

It's Monteray, and it's an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015)
 
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Thanks, I've got a bootable Monteray USB so I'm just trying to format the drive in recovery mode. When running these commands:

sudo diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk0
sudo diskutil erasedisk apfs "Drive Name Here" gpt /dev/disk0

First command successful, second says "You cannot manually format an existing APFS Container disk"
 
ok so I've used the code
Code: 
sudo diskutil apfs deleteVolume /dev/disk0s1

on all instances of the disks - disk0/0s1 etc. through to disk 3

and

Code: 
diskutil apfs deleteContainer diskX etc.

Then I've tried to erase disk3 and it says You cannot manually format an existing APFS Container disk

 
update - so I've actually got so exasperated I've removed the screen and plugged the SSD into my Windows Computer. I tried deleting the partitions with Easeus partition master but even that wouldn't run without errors so the only thing I can do is Wipe the disk with Easeus which I am doing at the moment.
 
Thanks for the help anyway.

Ordered a new Hard Drive. As I thought it's knackered. Could not get it to format even after wiping it with Easeus.
 
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I've installed the new SSD and gone to erase it - the options show Mac OS Extended, ExFat etc. but not APFS, isn't APFS needed for SSDs to run optimised ?
 
it's ok! I plugged the usb in I made the other day and it started disk util in an old format with no apfs option. removed it and did Internet Recovery and it's got APFS available.
 
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