Please Help! Can't Reformat Hard Drive After Hackintosh - Have Searched Like Crazy!

[belko]

Hi everyone...thank you ahead of time for your help.

I created a (3rd) Hacktinosh a few years back and now I'm repurposing the hard drive on the first one I built. For some reason I'm not able to reformat the hard drive using disk utilities or what I would call basic commands in terminal (i.e. if you have any ideas other than what you see below please, please let me know). I'm still a major beginner - even 3 builds in - and each one I did by the skin of my teeth. Why in the world can I not reformat this hard drive? Honestly, I just want to delete it to put a fresh install of OS X on...that's it!

When I try to use Disk Utility, it says it "Erase process has failed. Click Done to continue." It get's to partition mapping stage before it fails. The weird thing is when I look at it, it shows the drive as full...then after I try to erase it, it shows the disk as not full...so something is happening...it just gets stuck.

Any help/ideas/suggestions you can provide would be incredibly appreciated. I should have asked for help eariler but I've been working ont his for 2 freaking days am about to lose my mind!

If it's helpful, the OS version installed on this HD was Mavericks. On the computer I'm currently working from (an old laptop) I'm running High Sierra (bc it won't allow me to update any further).

Thank you SO much.

PS...beneath is the code I've tried to run in terminal. Again, I don't know what I'm doing.

Spencer

loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk4
Forced unmount of all volumes on disk4 was successful
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ disk util list
-bash: disk: command not found
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *480.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         479.9 GB   disk0s2

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +479.9 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            193.2 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 20.1 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                512.2 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      8.6 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk2 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +17.9 MB    disk2
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Flash Player            17.8 MB    disk2s2

/dev/disk3 (disk image):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        +25.1 MB    disk3
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         32.3 KB    disk3s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Flash Player            25.1 MB    disk3s2

/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *250.1 GB   disk4
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk4s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Mavericks               249.7 GB   disk4s2

loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk2s3
Could not find APFS Container Reference or Physical Store disk2s3
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk2s3
Could not find APFS Container Reference or Physical Store disk2s3
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk4s2
You must specify either an APFS Container Reference or Physical Store
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$ diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk4s1
You must specify either an APFS Container Reference or Physical Store
loaners-MacBook-Pro:~ loaner95$

 

[Going Bald]

First thing is to make sure of ownership of the drive before you try to erase/format it. If you want to try it in terminal, first run diskutil list so the disk identifier is right in front of you. Say it is /dev/disk4 same as above and you want erase the drive reformatting it to JHFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with a drive name New. First make sure you own it:

sudo diskutil enableOwnership /dev/disk4s2

Then erase and reformat it:

diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ New /dev/disk4s2