High Sierra’s Disk Utility Does Not Recognize Unformatted Disks
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
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As shown above, clicking View > Show All Devices does not cause the raw disk to appear.
Disk Utility has been a disaster since it was rewritten for El Capitan. It now has a single window, so you can only do one action at a time even though actions may take many hours. It’s missing key features related to Core Storage. Mounting/unmounting and partitioning often fail. Strangely, I’ve not had any problems when using the underlying diskutil command directly.
High Sierra did fix the bug from Sierra where Disk Utility would always show the tab bar, with a single giant tab, even though it did not let you create more tabs.
Update (2018-01-14): Pierre Igot:
Software quality at @apple in 2017 (in #DiskUtility):
1. greyed-out text for disabled item is barely legible over dark-blue background selection colour;
2. volume is unmounted but the “Rename” menu item is still enabled (and doesn’t do anything, of course).
Update (2018-01-19): Lloyd Chambers:
Ultimately I failed to be be able to use Disk Utility at all to restore the system to a single volume. Total brick wall impossible.
Update (2018-07-25): See also: Drew Crawford.
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[…] reproduce on my Mac. I’m guessing it’s not actually an APFS flaw but rather that Disk Utility is passing the wrong variable as the hint […]
[…] shows the password as the hint. So I’m guessing it’s not actually an APFS flaw but rather that Disk Utility is passing the wrong variable as the hint […]
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Well, ruining the utilities in macOS is a trend at Cupertino. Console.app is totally unusable since Sierra.