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Data Storage Desktops (Apple)

High Sierra's Disk Utility Does Not Recognize Unformatted Disks (tinyapps.org) 135

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
macOS 10.13's Disk Utility 17.0 (1626) does not recognize raw drives, reads a blog post, shared by several readers. From the post: Diskutil does recognize the drive. We'll use it to perform a quick, cursory format (e.g., diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ NewDisk GPT disk0) to make the disk appear in Disk Utility, where further modifications can more easily be made. Plugging in an unformatted external drive produces the usual alert, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize... | Ignore | Eject", but clicking Initialize just opens Disk Utility without the disk appearing. There's an option in Disk Utility to view "all devices," but clicking that doesn't show raw disks, the blog post adds.
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High Sierra's Disk Utility Does Not Recognize Unformatted Disks More

High Sierra's Disk Utility Does Not Recognize Unformatted Disks

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  • I am not surprised (Score:5, Funny)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday October 02, 2017 @02:53PM (#55295017)
    Apple assumes everyone gets everything from Apple. And Apple would never sell a device that was not prepared at the factory.

    • and pro hardware (imac pro) you can't change the disk easily or even with some basic repair work. Having to unglue and reglue a screen is far from easy.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Complete nonsense, imac's dont have glued in screens at all, they are held in place by a magnetic interference fit and can be removed in under a minute with a sucker clamp. The HD is then easily accessible and replaceable. It has been this way since the first Aluminium unibody imacs 10 years ago. Imac's are very easy to work on.

        • Re:and pro hardware (imac pro) you can't change di (Score:4, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02, 2017 @04:09PM (#55295907)

          https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+Retina+5K+Display+Teardown/30260

          See Step 4.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by AC-x ( 735297 )

          imac's dont have glued in screens at all

          Apple have been gluing the imac's screen since 2012 [ifixit.com].

    • Apple assumes everyone gets everything from Apple.

      Has this ever been true? Sure, it's a funny line to toss out there, but Apple has obviously recognized that their products exist in a world beyond their control, which is why we see support for SMB, NTFS, and a host of other technologies and formats that didn't originate at Apple.

      To be sure, their support falls far short of what we see on Windows or Linux, but in the various Macs I've worked on, I've replaced RAM, batteries, SSDs, HDDs, and even created my own Fusion Drive, none of which I did using Apple-b

  • So Apple.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02, 2017 @02:55PM (#55295037)

    How do you expect to format a drive to make it appear when you can't make it appear to format the drive?

    Do people think about this kind of thing anymore?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )

      How do you expect to format a drive to make it appear when you can't make it appear to format the drive?

      Try man mkfs. They are likely just piping error messages of some low level utility. For example, parted would return "error: /foo/bar: unrecognized disk".

      • Try man mkfs. They are likely just piping error messages of some low level utility. For example, parted would return "error: /foo/bar: unrecognized disk".

        Some OS component recognized the disk and announced that it was uninitialized, then offered to send them to initialize it. It's not acceptable for the subsequent tool not to recognize that there's a disk there, even if all it knows about it is that it can't do anything with it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tk77 ( 1774336 )

        Well its more like man diskutil, as you can still see unformatted disks there and use diskutil eraseDisk ... to format it.

        A bigger issue is that when you plug an unformatted disk in, it pops up the usual message that its unreadable and to initialize it. Clicking initialize opens disk util which then does not show the unformatted drive (which it did in all previous versions). So for the average user, this could be confusing.

        This looks like it could just be a bug in Disk Utility. Hopefully.

        • A bigger issue is that when you plug an unformatted disk in, it pops up the usual message that its unreadable and to initialize it. Clicking initialize opens disk util which then does not show the unformatted drive (which it did in all previous versions). So for the average user, this could be confusing.

          Yeah, but what "average user" is buying an unformatted drive? Virtually everything is pre-formatted out of the factory these days so users don't have to format in order to start using their new drives.

          A dumb bug to be sure -- but the impact should only be to those who have blanked out a drive on their own without re-formatting/re-initializing it at the same time.

          Yaz

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tk77 ( 1774336 )

            Yeah, but what "average user" is buying an unformatted drive? Virtually everything is pre-formatted out of the factory these days so users don't have to format in order to start using their new drives.

            A dumb bug to be sure -- but the impact should only be to those who have blanked out a drive on their own without re-formatting/re-initializing it at the same time.

            Yaz

            True. Also, in using the previous release to help test this (10.12) I couldn't find a way (via Disk Utility) to blank a disk. There used to be an option in Disk Utility that would let you initialize as "empty space". That seems to have gone away (shows how often I use it). I had to drop to the command line to clear the disk (w/ the help of dd). Something that the average user will also not be doing.

            Still would be nice to have these features in the gui. But I can live with it, as long as they don't rem

        • Disk Utility is mostly a very thin wrapper around diskutil, so there's a good chance that this is a bug in the underlying frameworks, not the GUI.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tk77 ( 1774336 )

            But yet diskutil displays all drives and allows you to initialize an unformatted disk, whereas Disk Utility does neither. Assuming they both use the same underlying framework then why would one display unformatted disks when the other does not? It would seem like there's something in the GUI that selectively displays the drives. This is already evident by the option to "show hidden" partitions (ie the rescue partition).

            So it looks like either Disk Utility is purposely ignoring unformatted disks (boo), or

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bongo ( 13261 )

          I thought Disk Utility.app called on diskutil anyway to do the format. But they both (?) rely on Disk Arbitration framework to know what's going on. So just something someone forgot to update when the framework was changed...?

    • How do you expect to format a drive to make it appear when you can't make it appear to format the drive?

      Okay -- it's a pretty dumb bug. One that is hopefully fixed quickly.

      From a practical point however, how many people are actually ever going to run into this? The drive hardware built into Macs is pre-formatted, so it won't trigger this bug. Likewise, virtually every other external drive you can buy these days is pre-formatted, so again -- you're not going to be able to trigger this bug unless you erase the drive without re-initializing it at the same time.

      Yaz

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This could be the new "keyboard error, press any key to continue."

  • It Just Works (Score:5, Funny)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Monday October 02, 2017 @02:58PM (#55295063)

    You're holding it wrong?

    • That might be true. A few years back, Apple changed the way monitor calibration works, reduced it so all you can do is change the "target white point." The rest somehow happens automatically or something, I don't know.

      Unless you press "option-shift" when you open the calibration tool. Then you get the full calibration tool. "Option-shift." Good luck figuring that one out. Hooray for intuitive UI!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        Try adding a windows network shared printer to osx.. First, you have to hold down control and click on the add-printer dialog in order to add an 'advanced' button...
        seriously?

        Then there's the removal of the 'hidden' SSID support. While it does nothing for security, it does keep phone calls from techno illiterates down as they won't try connecting to networks they don't see in the dialog. This allows the creation of 'infrastructure' networks not meant for BYOD.

      • That might be true. A few years back, Apple changed the way monitor calibration works, reduced it so all you can do is change the "target white point." The rest somehow happens automatically or something, I don't know.

        Unless you press "option-shift" when you open the calibration tool. Then you get the full calibration tool. "Option-shift." Good luck figuring that one out. Hooray for intuitive UI!

        Not as bad as LAN mode in Splatoon 2...
        http://en-americas-support.nin... [nintendo.com]

  • Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Billy the Mountain ( 225541 ) on Monday October 02, 2017 @03:05PM (#55295161) Journal
    Did you try turning it off and turning it back on again?
    • Yes. I did. So... prepare to put mustard on those words, for you will soon be consuming them along with this slice of humble pie, that comes direct from the oven of shame, set at gas mark 'egg on your face'.

  • What a Bunch of Wimps (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    My CP/M system wouldn't read unformatted 8" floppys back in 1982.
    It took a day to get the right data sheets and write my own formatter in assembler.
    Damn kids today can't do anything.

  • This may be a sign that the ARM macs with have no finder and be app store only.

  • Maybe I missed the warning, but I thought, why not convert my USB connected Time Machine drive to APFS... the conversion is allowed in Disk Utility, so I started it up. After a looonnnnggggg time (more than 6 hours, but less than 21 hours) it completed. And Time Machine says "Where is my backup disk?" It's right there, same name and everything, just APFS. OK, when checking disk selected, I see my disk a second time in the list, so I choose that. TM tells me that I need to erase the disk. Well, I really don

  • Just happened to me (Score:5, Informative)

    by sehryan ( 412731 ) on Monday October 02, 2017 @03:45PM (#55295625)

    I ran into this exact problem today. Clicking "Initialize..." did nothing, with the drive not showing up in Disk Utility.

    Turned the enclosure off and back on, and clicked "Ignore." Disk came right up in the Utility without issues, and I was able to get it working from there.

  • Frontpage worthy? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So a minor bug in an Apple specific disk utility software is newsworthy? I'm going to start posting news about bugs in parted now.

  • So assuming it's an enclosure with a 2.5 or even 3.5" drive in it, some of their controllers can't initialize a drive even in Windows because they're too simplistic and outdated. I've ran into this before and now I only get Orico USB 3.0 ones because I randomly tried them and they work. I wouldn't necessarily blame the utility but it may just be the enclosure and yes, store-bought externals can have the same problem.

  • The disk will then change its form (=reformat) and eventually erase old data.

    Pro tip: run command `top' to quickly get to the peak of High Sierra.

  • And I don't believe it's a "problem" either, encrypted or any hard drive that's been used by a server (eg. as a raw volume for object storage systems) shows up as "uninitialized" when you plug them in but you also don't want a quick link to destroy the data on it.

    The only way to inspect the disk properly is to use the underlying Unix utilities where you then perhaps can see there is data on it, and yes, you can still destroy the data on it using command line.

    You can delete the data from Disk Utility, but it

  • Had a horrible flashback to HD SC Setup and non-Apple branded disks.

    • touché

      wasn't there something you had to do with the Resource Editor to get it to recognize disks that didn't have Apple-branded firmware? maybe that's applicable here

  • Put a new Samsung 850 SSD in a 2010 iMac yesterday and came across this issue. Checking it just now, the option seems to be in the View menu, select Show All Devices. Show Only Volumes is the default and if selected a new drive (with no formatted volumes on it) will not show up. I can only hope that this default view gets changed in an update, on account of it being idiotic as it stands.
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