Disk Utility won't erase iMac drive

I have a late 2012 27" iMac.
I was taking it to the Apple Store to fix The Mechanism™ broke. (The tilt hinge). As I knew fixing it would entail leaving the iMac there for several days, I cloned my drive and erased the iMac.
HOWEVER, when trying to do it, both form a USB install drive I set up AND from the Recovery Partition, Disk Utility would fail to erase the drive. It would quit and go back to the install drive directory.
I then booted back to the regular drive, manually dragged most of the stuff to the trash and emptied it. I then went back to the USB drive and tried one last time.
This time, the drive reformatted like it was supposed to. I tried again, it worked again.
I loaded Mavericks on, and packed the iMac up and went to the store (where it is now).
The "Genius" had no idea why the erasing didn't work earlier, and since things now did work, I couldn't replicate. They're diagnostic scan showed everything was good.
It's the 1TB + Fusion drive.
BEFORE I manually erased everything, there was around 120 gb free on the drive. After there was 900+gb free.
Anyone seen anything like this? Have ideas what was happening?

Kappy wrote:
There are no free utilities for defragmenting a drive. Only the cloning I described is free.
Here's what you should do:
To resize the drive do the following:
1. Open Disk Utility and select the drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list.
2. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window. You should see the graphical sizing window showing the existing partitions. A portion may appear as a blue rectangle representing the used space on a partition.
3. In the lower right corner of the sizing rectangle for each partition is a resizing gadget. Select it with the mouse and move the bottom of the rectangle upwards until you have reduced the existing partition enough to create the desired new volume's size. The space below the resized partition will appear gray. Click on the Apply button and wait until the process has completed. +(Note: You can only make a partition smaller in order to create new free space.)+
4. Click on the [+] button below the sizing window to add a new partition in the gray space you freed up. Give the new volume a name, if you wish, then click on the Apply button. Wait until the process has completed.
You should now have a new volume on the drive.
That's what I did and it didn't work.

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Kappy wrote:
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Problem resolved. I'm posting this note for anyone else who might run into this situation and come across this discussion.
It actually did turn out to be Sophos -- Cloud, that is. I'd been using Sophos' free Mac antivirus software on a variety of systems but forgot that I was now testing out Sophos Cloud on my own MacBook, which is their new endpoint solution, and supposed to be compatible with OS X 10.9 (although the Mac version is listed as "beta") Sophos Cloud includes a new feature called Device Control which allows you to create a company-wide policy to control access to hardware such as USB drives, optical drives, etc. But apparently it's still pretty buggy. I had my Device Control configured with the default setting of "monitor but do not block" but it was most definitely gumming up the system. With Sophos Cloud installed, here's what happens if I try to run "Verify Disk" on any attached drive. Note on the left side how "disk2s2" shows as a sub-volume for each hard drive.
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Works fine. Note that the "disk2s2" subvolumes are also gone. This is the way Disk Utility also appears on a 10.8 or 10.9 system, even if you have the standard free Sophos for Mac software installed. It's only Sophos Cloud that's not playing nice. It also appears to have stopped me from being able to play DVDs from an attached Apple USB SuperDrive -- that problem was likewise solved by removing Sophos Cloud.

Disk Utility won't erase iMac drive

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