Erase MacBook hard drive without the use of the mouse

Question

I want to sell my Early 2015 MacBook Pro Retina.

It has an unknown issue where the mouse input isn't working properly and I can't click (when using either the trackpad or a USB mouse).

I have got to the Disk Utility page but I can't click the 'Erase' button to finish the job and there seems to be no way to do this with the keyboard.

Is there a way I can erase the hard drive without using the mouse? I can access the Terminal when I login.

Answer 1

You can use a Keyboard combination to erase your Macbook with VoiceOver's accessibility feature.

1. First, reboot your computer and be in Recovery mode with the combination of ⌘+R.

2. At the recovery welcome screen, press ⌘+F5 keys (or ⌘+fn+F5, if you're on an Apple laptop) to enable VoiceOver's accessibility features.

3. On the macOS Utilities selection screen, use the arrow keys to highlight Disk Utility, press the Tab button to highlight the Continue button and press ⌃+⌥+Space as instructed by the voice-over display screen.

4. Use ⇥ (tab) if needed to be on your Macintosh HD-Data. Once you follow the voice control option, you can be on Erase option, and press ⌃+⌥+Space

5. Voila !! it is done without any mouse too.

Answer 2

This can be done from macOS Recovery without the use of a mouse and primarily using just the arrow, tab and space keys. The enter key may need to be used on some objects, depending on the selection(s) made:

1. Boot to macOS Recovery by holding down ⌘R when starting the Mac.
2. At the macOS Utilities window, press the down-arrow key four times. This highlights Disk Utility because the table containing it already has focus when booted to macOS Recovery.
3. Press the tab key once to highlight the Continue button.
4. Press the space key to actuate the highlighted Continue button, which starts Disk Utility.

In Disk Utility:

1. Use the up-arrow key to highlight the e.g. Macintosh HD, or whichever volume you want to erase.
2. Use the tab key multiple times until the Erase button on the Toolbar is highlighted.
3. Press the space key to actuate the highlighted Erase button.
4. On the ensuing sheet, e.g. Erase Macintosh HD, use the previously mentioned keystroke methods to navigate, select and actuate the buttons as wanted. You can also actuate the Format: pop-up menu, once selected with the tab key, with the up-arrow or down-arrow keys and press the enter key after making the selection.

_{Note: These steps were tested from macOS Recovery on a system running macOS Catalina and works as described without the use of VoiceOver.}

Answer 3

In addition to the other answers provided, if at any point you want to access the menus in the menu bar using only the keyboard, you can use control (⌃) + F2 to move your focus to the menu bar, then use your arrow keys to navigate the menus.

For example, this would allow you to access the Edit > Erase... option within the Disk Utility menus.

Additionally, this would allow you to access the Terminal by selecting Utilities > Terminal in the macOS Recovery menus.

From Terminal, you could run diskutil commands to erase the internal disk.

diskutil list will list all the disks the system is aware of. If your goal is to erase the internal disk, there is a good chance that will be listed as /dev/disk0 (internal).

Here is a sample from my MacBook Pro that shipped with a 512GB drive.

/dev/disk0 (internal):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                         500.3 GB   disk0
   1:             Apple_APFS_ISC ⁨⁩                        524.3 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS ⁨Container disk3⁩         494.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:        Apple_APFS_Recovery ⁨⁩                        5.4 GB     disk0s3

You can then run the diskutil eraseDisk command to erase the internal disk using the HFS+ format, and labeling it as the default "Macintosh HD".

diskutil eraseDisk HFS+J "Macintosh HD" /dev/disk0

The disk will then be fully erased and ready for a clean installation of macOS.

Answer 4

If you can open the Terminal, the command rm -r * will erase the whole disk, we usually avoid telling anyone that because they may accidentally use it - most people here aren't looking to erase their disk drive. You can type man rm to read the man page for the rm command.