
High Sierra's Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks - miles
https://tinyapps.org/blog/mac/201710010700_high_sierra_disk_utility.html
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stefco_
I don't understand why we had to lose the old disk utility GUI. The new one is
so underpowered and buggy that you need to use shell commands to get anything
done. Things like this erode the benefits of MacOS as a lovely GUI environment
over a strong UNIX backbone and make me tempted to just switch to some Linux
distro.

~~~
r00fus
I still have a copy of the old AirPort utility as well so I can make
adjustments that the new utility can't.

I thought they were going to slowly improve the new one to have feature key
coverage, but so far nada.

~~~
zdw
Option-clicking on most UI elements in the new Airport Utility gives you the
more complex dialog boxes from the old version, not the new wizard/walkthrough
ones.

Lots of debug/admin related stuff is hidden behind the Option key in macOS.
Try clicking on the volume or wifi menu extras to see some examples of this.

~~~
laythea
Yeah I feel like I am playing "Where's Wally", randomly Option-key clicking
various different things to see what I can do. I guess that's fun for some
people, but in my opinion a Menu, is supposed to layout all the options.

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xenadu02
This is two bugs:

1\. By default Disk Utility shows only volumes. Click the view toolbar button
and select Show All Devices

2\. The Show All Devices setting doesn't properly take effect until you quit
and re-open Disk Utility.

If you leave Disk Utility in "Show All Devices" mode then you shouldn't run
into this problem.

~~~
speleding
In a related bug, if you've just enabled the "Show all devices" setting then
trying to format the disk will give an error saying it's unable to unmount the
device. (Temporarily switching off "Show all devices" is another way around
this if you don't want to restart)

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dunham
There is a little "view" dropdown in the upper left corner that toggles
between "Show Only Volumes" and "Show All Devices".

~~~
miles
Tried that - raw disks still do not appear. Tested on three different Macs.
Will update the animated GIF to show clicking on View > Show All Devices.

UPDATE: Just posted a new animated GIF here showing the problem persisting
after clicking View > Show All Devices:
[https://tinyapps.org/screenshots/high_sierra_disk_utility.gi...](https://tinyapps.org/screenshots/high_sierra_disk_utility.gif)

(Had to clear my browser cache to see the new image.)

~~~
dunham
Thanks for checking. I didn't have time to wipe a spare disk and check myself,
but I knew that feature was very subtle. This definitely diminishes the
utility of Disk Utility.

~~~
miles
My pleasure!

But please see xenadu02's comment[0], which explains that one needs to quit
and relaunch Disk Utility after selecting View > Show All Devices for it to
take effect.

Sorry to have missed that; I ran into the problem on three different Macs
while installing High Sierra and unfortunately went straight to the command
line rather than testing more extensively. My apologies.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15386547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15386547)

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LeoNatan25
Maybe they’ll fix it in 2-3 years. This generation of OSes and developer tools
is considerably lower in quality. But let’s release 5 new iPhones next year
like clockwork—clearly the software teams can handle it.

And cue in the Apple apologists that will tell you how OS X Snow Leopard also
had that one famous bug, so it’s not all bad. Please.

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grandalf
I tried formatting an external SSD as APFS and the gui disk utility was
extraordinarily buggy. It certainly appears that nobody tested this before
High Sierra was released.

~~~
foobiekr
I filed a bug with apple on how broken Disk Utility was in Sierra; I included
a screen capture giving a complete movie showing how deliriously broken it
was. Apple closed the bug with "not enough information."

~~~
yborg
Submitting Radar reports now is a complete waste of time, they go straight to
the trash. Maybe if you're a recognizable name you'd get an engineer involved,
but I doubt it.

~~~
intoverflow2
Sad that I hear something complained about on certain Apple podcasts and that
little qualm of that host is fixed magically a release or two later while real
users are ignored.

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PrimHelios
Is High Sierra in early beta or something? With everything I've heard, it
seems to be getting close to Vista levels of bad.

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lojack
Ran into this the other day when trying to replace a bad hard drive. Was
planning on starting from scratch, wasn’t able to do network recovery, had to
do network recovery of lion to reformat the hard drive and then restart the
high Sierra network recovery.

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cjcampbell
I think we'll see a few bumps as we transition to APFS. I ran into quite a few
edge cases trying to rebuild from a bootable backup after having my laptop
serviced. All is well now, but I definitely got my cursing in for the next few
weeks.

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thomastjeffery
I don't understand how Microsoft and Apple are so _bad_ at partitioning.

I've _never_ used a partitioning tool as stable, easy to use, _or_ featureful
as GParted; not for lack of trying. A long time ago, I concluded that a simple
live cd with GParted is the only sane way to do any partitioning, and I have
yet to find any evidence to the contrary.

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fleeno
I found this out the other day while trying to format a floppy! For way too
long I thought it was just the drive misbehaving.

~~~
miles
Cannot tell if joking or serious, but mad props to you either way! If you
really are still using floppies, would you mind sharing how and why?

~~~
fleeno
I am serious, though I was just going through a stack of old floppies to see
what was on them. I just decided to try to format one for fun!

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overcast
I ran into this adding an external disk. You just need to initialize with the
prompt, and then close and reopen the disk utility, it will show up.

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therealmarv
Can somebody test if disk encrypted Truecrypt (I use NTFS) are not working
anymore on High Sierra? Or is this only affecting Disk Utility??

