How to erase DVD-RW in Disk Utility

Question

I have a MacBook Pro Mid 2012 with built-in SuperDrive. MacBook Pro is running OS X 10.11. I am trying to erase a DVD-RW disc that is filled with some images. But the erase option is greyed out:

Note that I do can select a disk image and press Burn "Disk Image.dmg" to disc and erase the disc and write new things to it. But creating a disk image is very slow in my case and I would just like it to simply erase my rewritable DVD disc. Is there a way to use Disk Utility or a 3rd party app to erase my disc? Thanks.

Answer 1

Go into Finder and right click on the DVD, there should be an option "Erase rewritable disk". Apparently that's how to erase disks in El Capitan.

Answer 2

For anyone running High Sierra (10.13) or a similar version where a rewritable CD or DVD can't be erased from Finder because MacOS can't read it

use the the terminal instead:

drutil -drive 1 erase full

See the manual for the full usage (man drutil) and ensure drive 1 is the particular drive you want if you have multiple.

This can happen, for example, if you have burned a live Linux image that must be bootable.