Reformatting the drive through the command line instead: diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ NAME disk0 → diskutil apfs createContainer /dev/disk0s2 → diskutil apfs addVolume disk0s2 APFS NAME (It fails here with Error starting APFS Container creation: The given disk is not an APFS Container Reference (-69630), even though I just made a container there.

Reformatting the drive as other things, such as ExFAT / FAT / MacOS Journaled, then trying to format as APFS. Simply zeroing the disk again diskutil zeroDisk disk0 (I’m not sure what the actual difference between these two are). Securely erasing the drive diskutil secureErase 0 disk0. It fails when adding a Volume with An internal error occurred. It appears to first format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) then create an APFS container, then add a APFS Volume. Recently, however, on the final step where I format it as a APFS drive, it fails in creating the APFS container and says Internal State Error. Nothing super crazy, maybe a little redundant in steps, maybe a little overkill, maybe a little unnecessary. Once that process is complete, I use the Disk Utility application to reformat as APFS, and install macOS. Using the Terminal, running diskutil zeroDisk disk0. Using the Terminal, running gpt destroy disk0 where disk0. Using the Terminal, unmounting the disk diskutil unmountDisk disk0, where disk0 is the internal NVME drive. Using the Disk Utility, erasing the Disk and formatting it as APFS with a GPT Partition scheme. This involves the following steps (in the given order):Ĭreating a USB installer with the latest macOS Mojave 10.14.2.īooting into the USB (Pressing Option key on boot). I’ve recently ran a semi-routine clean install on my 2018 MacBook Pro.

Diskutil erasedisk