Quitting Disk Utility in middle of an operation erasing a 2TB hard drive

Hello,
I have bought a 2TB external hard drive for backing up my files. I noticed when i plugged it in on my iMac that the files can be copied off the device but nothing can be altered and put on. So after a lot of research I heard that I should make a single pass erase on Disk Utility to reformat the hard drive to be used in both systems. So I did.
The problem is that I saw it would take about 10 hours for this to happen and it has been many hours more. I saw on some other sites that some people had problems where it took days. If I quit in the middle of a erase operation it warns me that quitting in the middle may render the drive non-operational. I don't want to lose it as I spent a considerable amount on it.
Shall I risk it and quit the process? If not, how long intuitively would it take for the 2TB hard drive to finish?
Thanks!

Hello azrael2010
Welcome to Apple Support Communities
A single or multiple pass erase +(writing 0's)+ is not necessary before reformatting a new drive, it is meant to write over and secure data from recovery.
To reformat a drive from NTSF to MS-DOS/FAT-32 all one needs to do is:
1. Select the External HDs first icon in the Disk Utility list of drives
2. Select the Partition tab
3. Select the number of desired partitions under Volume Scheme:
4. Select Options...
5. Select Master Boot Record and click OK (+setting the Partition scheme)+
6. Select MS-DOS (FAT) +(setting the format)+
7. Select the Apply button +(which should quick erase and format the drive in a few minutes)+
Also see > http://www.kenstone.net/fcphomepage/partitioningtiger.html
Personally I have stopped a Secure Erase on many occasions and always opted for the quick erase when formatting a new drive from MS-DOS/FAT-32 to GUID Partition Table/Mac OS Extended and never had a problem...
Also note MS-DOS/FAT-32 has a single file size limitation of 4GB.
See >http://www.macworld.com/article/51972/2006/07/ww_drives.html
Dennis

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