Tell me more ×  I'm trying to reformat the hard drive on an iMac
G5 prior to selling it. I've booted the Mac from the
installation DVD that came with it, opened Disk Utility, and
told it to erase the drive using both security options for
zeroing out and rewriting the data. However, Disk Utility seems
to be hanging: I let it run for over 12 hours and it didn't
finish; I needed to unplug the Mac and restart it (the program
wouldn't even let me force-quit it.)  I started the process
again, but it still seems to be going extraordinarily slowly. Is
there something wrong with this, or does it just plain take a
long time? I'm not hearing the hard disc spinning; it sounds
like it's hung again.  share|improve this question add comment
1 Answer  up vote 1 down vote accepted  How big is your hard-
drive? It's entirely possible that it would be normal for
zeroing out the sectors to take that long. I'm only
extrapolating here, but I've had secure-deletions of the trash
take an hour or more for a few gigabytes, so if the h