OS X El Capitan's Disk Utility is a mess

[Riwam]

No choice on the OSX installer...

What speaks against installing afterwards as well the modified Yosemite DU as I did?
They won't fight one against the other.
Ed
[doublepost=1463470493][/doublepost]

My TM disk got full and I had to delete some backups, worked fine before, but then the most recent update....affirming that I wanted to delete old backups somehow managed to annihilate my drive and make it invisible. Even on the PC at work the thing won't show up.

Strange. Usually the TM deletes by itself the oldest backups when it runs out of space. A very unlucky situation I truly don't umdetstand.
I am sorry for you.
Ed

 

[inni]

Not sure what happened with this, or why I decided trusting the redesigned Disk Utility application in OS X El Capitan was a good idea, but it gave my iMac quite the run for its money over the past few days until I fixed it.

Just in case anyone has a similar experience, I figured I'd post my experience here. Hopefully, it'll be of service to someone who knows next to squat about partition schemes and so on.

Ever since I'd received my iMac with Retina display, I'd never gotten around to setting up Time Machine. I'm not too invested in having a full system backup, but being able to recover a file when needed is pretty nice.

I'm not too worried about drive failure, as I keep super-important files backed up to a flash drive and/or the Internet, so I've always used Time Machine on a disk partition—I've never used even close to all of my disk space, so I might as well put it to some use.

Enter OS X El Capitan with its (admittedly pretty) redesigned Disk Utility application. I figured that the El Capitan developer preview was as good a time as any to get Time Machine going, and I went to create a ~400 GB partition on my 1 TB Fusion Drive. All was well.

Until Disk Utility locked up. And then crashed. [expletive].

I was left with 400 GB of unusable storage. Disk Utility wouldn't do anything in First Aid, I couldn't delete the partition (it seems Disk Utility forgot how to merge partitions), and diskutil in Terminal was also being a pain with the repairVolume function—as the partition couldn't be mounted.

So, the fix I found:

1. Boot into Single-User Mode (Command-Shift-S upon boot)
2. Enter "/sbin/fsck -fy" then "exit" or "reboot" once it's complete
3. Reboot normally
4. Open Terminal and use "diskutil list" to find the identifier of the broken partition
5. Enter "diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ [new name] [volume identifier]"

After that, it should be usable for whatever use supports Journaled HFS+. Of course, you can use any format you'd like in place of "JHFS+".

Hope this might help at least one poor soul out there, since it's been a couple days of hair-pulling for me. If nothing else, I'd stay away from the new Disk Utility for the time being.

[doublepost=1464461043][/doublepost]I'm new to this forum so with all due respect, what i don't work in terminal? The disk utility in el Capitan is stuck at present. All I can do is force quit and then my usb which needed to be erased, is filled with misc. data. Can you help a sister out?

 

[jonblatho]

[doublepost=1464461043][/doublepost]I'm new to this forum so with all due respect, what i don't work in terminal? The disk utility in el Capitan is stuck at present. All I can do is force quit and then my usb which needed to be erased, is filled with misc. data. Can you help a sister out?

If Disk Utility is failing, you'll have to do the format on either a different OS, use a third party tool, or use Terminal's diskutil function.

If you'd like to use Terminal, which I recommend, make sure the flash drive is connected and then enter "diskutil list" to find out the drive's identifier. (You might want to write this down somewhere just to have it handy as you do the operations—you don't want to erase the wrong disk. The identifier may be different next time if there is a next time.)

Make sure to view the list of commands to be sure of exactly what you'd like to do. Do this by just entering "diskutil".

From what you've said I think you'll probably just want to use "diskutil reformat [identifier]" if you don't have anything that needs to be erased securely (so as to make it basically unrecoverable), but again, look through the list of commands to be sure. (Again, be sure you're using the right disk identifier, at peril of entering the wrong one and losing data on another drive.)

If you need any more help, let me know. There are also third-party tools to do this, but I'm the type to avoid installing third-party software unless I have to, so I don't have any recommendations for you. A tool I've found which I like for cleaning out old files is DaisyDisk, but it sounds like you're wanting to wipe the drive in this case.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

If Disk Utility is failing, you'll have to do the format on either a different OS, use a third party tool, or use Terminal's diskutil function.

If you'd like to use Terminal, which I recommend, make sure the flash drive is connected and then enter "diskutil list" to find out the drive's identifier. (You might want to write this down somewhere just to have it handy as you do the operations—you don't want to erase the wrong disk. The identifier may be different next time if there is a next time.)

Make sure to view the list of commands to be sure of exactly what you'd like to do. Do this by just entering "diskutil".

From what you've said I think you'll probably just want to use "diskutil reformat [identifier]" if you don't have anything that needs to be erased securely (so as to make it basically unrecoverable), but again, look through the list of commands to be sure. (Again, be sure you're using the right disk identifier, at peril of entering the wrong one and losing data on another drive.)

If you need any more help, let me know. There are also third-party tools to do this, but I'm the type to avoid installing third-party software unless I have to, so I don't have any recommendations for you. A tool I've found which I like for cleaning out old files is DaisyDisk, but it sounds like you're wanting to wipe the drive in this case.

Thanks for lending a hand here!

But, are you serious by suggesting 3rd party applications / other OS's for Mac OS X disk handling? They crippled the OS by making an emoticon (in any color you like) out of such an IMPORTANT utility as DISK UTILITY. Let's give Windows 10 users the advise to use Max OS X Terminal commands for their Disk Management...

No, this a total Apple MAC OS X FAILURE and a complete laugh....

Cheers

 

[jonblatho]

Thanks for lending a hand here!

But, are you serious by suggesting 3rd party applications / other OS's for Mac OS X disk handling? They crippled the OS by making an emoticon (in any color you like) out of such an IMPORTANT utility as DISK UTILITY. Let's give Windows 10 users the advise to use Max OS X Terminal commands for their Disk Management...

No, this a total Apple MAC OS X FAILURE and a complete laugh....

Cheers

Yeah, I'm not happy about it. But it is what it is…if Disk Utility's not doing it, something has to.

 

[simon lefisch]

Terminal ftw!!

 

[m4v3r1ck]

Terminal ftw!!

But, isn't there a reason why we have a GUI for many commands you also can operate from within Terminal. Why not just keep an application like DU the way many of us were used to it easy-does-it?

Cheers

 

[simon lefisch]

But, isn't there a reason why we have a GUI for many commands you also can operate from within Terminal. Why not just keep an application like DU the way many of us were used to it easy-does-it?

Cheers

I agree, however Terminal is just as powerful, if not more. Plus I feel, and I know others do too, that using Terminal is quite beneficial in understanding how some of this stuff works. It's actually not as hard as you think. In fact, I prefer to use Terminal for a lot of things like moving large amounts of data using the cp or rsync commands instead of the drag and drop or copy/paste functions of Finder, formatting drives, etc. Reminds me of the good ol' DOS days lol.

 

[grahamperrin]

A Mavericks topic – Erase Free Space frozen – led me to boot El Capitan and revisit this Disk Utility topic.

… fixed the bug from Yosemite where you couldn't erase free space (on any drive!) unless you went into Recovery …

Are you sure? I booted El Capitan (not Recovery OS) and unless I'm missing something –

… removal of Secure Erase …

– there's no longer an option to securely Erase Free Space.

What might explain the loss of features such as that?

Maybe last year's app was designed primarily for a future Apple 'ecosystem' in which all 'freshened' storage defaults to Core Storage with encryption.

Please: can anyone imagine an alternative, more reasonable explanation?

A disk utility that ignores the current reality – masses of non-encrypted data, on myriad types of disk where Erase Free Space might apply – is simply piss-poor.

 

[jblongz]

Now that Apple has hinted about their new file system in the works, I hypothesize Disk Utility is bing pruned and purged of advanced features that relate to HFS, which may not be necessary in the future. You can still execute many of the missing commands via terminal. I know, it sucks, but if by any means necessary...

 

[panzer06]

Now that Apple has hinted about their new file system in the works, I hypothesize Disk Utility is bing pruned and purged of advanced features that relate to HFS, which may not be necessary in the future. You can still execute many of the missing commands via terminal. I know, it sucks, but if by any means necessary...

Still no excuse. Completely broken app with command line option is useless to many and inexcusable for such a large company.

I understand hiding some complexity but making it so you can't even reformat some drives is just idiotic.

 

[GarnetS]

Still no excuse. Completely broken app with command line option is useless to many and inexcusable for such a large company.

I understand hiding some complexity but making it so you can't even reformat some drives is just idiotic.

Absolutely agreed, why to sacrifice functionality in order to make it look prettier. It all end up with just one button in a couple of years, lol.

I agree I normally don't use prerelease anything, however in this case I really didn't like the alternatives. I had a manual backup so it was worth the risk. Besides the only drive I had it touch was the brand me 4TB backup disk and a sub stick. Worked great.

Same here, had to try Paragon HDM for Mac at prerelease state to deactivated freaking SIP, was a little worried, but it worked out just fine.

new file system in the works, I hypothesize Disk Utility is bing pruned and purged of advanced features that relate to HFS, which may not be necessary in the future. You can still execute many of the missing commands via terminal.

I'm afraid even terminal wouldn't help, only third-party programs.

 

[H2SO4]

Absolutely agreed, why to sacrifice functionality in order to make it look prettier. It all end up with just one button in a couple of years, lol.



Same here, had to try Paragon HDM for Mac at prerelease state to deactivated freaking SIP, was a little worried, but it worked out just fine.



I'm afraid even terminal wouldn't help, only third-party programs.

I run Windows in a VM for occasional gaming. One day I had the idea to install Mountain Lion into a VM too. Disk Utility in the virtual machine works great. It’s actually quite painless too;
I almost only use the ML VM for disk utility. Security therefore isn’t an issue so if need be I could set it for auto login
Then I could set DU to run at login. That way it’s even less mouse clicks.

 

[grahamperrin]

Did someone recently post, to this topic, a link to an app that they had produced? I wanted to test the app and thank the person but at the time, I had no usable Mac. Was a post removed?

I found a few other pages, none of these include what I seek:

• EL Cap Disk Utility is terrible - alternatives? Need RAID support. | tonymacx86.com (2015-10-31)
• Solution To El Capitan's New Disk Utility! Want the Old One Back? (2015-11-16)
• Alternatives to El Capitan's Disk Utility : osx (2015-12-18)
• Alternative to Disk Utility? | Communities (2016-02-05)
• Disk Utility Alternative for OS X (2016-04-06)

 

[panzer06]

Interestingly, Disk Utility works better now (sort of). Coming from 10.11.3 to this new 10.11.6 (I upgraded just to see if Disk Utility was better since I needed to do some formatting) now allows me to erase a Windows formatted External Disk and format it for OS X. It took 2 tries for each disk but each time the 2nd attempt completed the task.

It's still annoying but at least I didn't have to use a 3rd party utility to get it done.

 

[profbg]

Not sure what happened with this, or why I decided trusting the redesigned Disk Utility application in OS X El Capitan was a good idea, but it gave my iMac quite the run for its money over the past few days until I fixed it.

Just in case anyone has a similar experience, I figured I'd post my experience here. Hopefully, it'll be of service to someone who knows next to squat about partition schemes and so on.

Ever since I'd received my iMac with Retina display, I'd never gotten around to setting up Time Machine. I'm not too invested in having a full system backup, but being able to recover a file when needed is pretty nice.

I'm not too worried about drive failure, as I keep super-important files backed up to a flash drive and/or the Internet, so I've always used Time Machine on a disk partition—I've never used even close to all of my disk space, so I might as well put it to some use.

Enter OS X El Capitan with its (admittedly pretty) redesigned Disk Utility application. I figured that the El Capitan developer preview was as good a time as any to get Time Machine going, and I went to create a ~400 GB partition on my 1 TB Fusion Drive. All was well.

Until Disk Utility locked up. And then crashed. [expletive].

I was left with 400 GB of unusable storage. Disk Utility wouldn't do anything in First Aid, I couldn't delete the partition (it seems Disk Utility forgot how to merge partitions), and diskutil in Terminal was also being a pain with the repairVolume function—as the partition couldn't be mounted.

So, the fix I found:

1. Boot into Single-User Mode (Command-Shift-S upon boot)
2. Enter "/sbin/fsck -fy" then "exit" or "reboot" once it's complete
3. Reboot normally
4. Open Terminal and use "diskutil list" to find the identifier of the broken partition
5. Enter "diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ [new name] [volume identifier]"

After that, it should be usable for whatever use supports Journaled HFS+. Of course, you can use any format you'd like in place of "JHFS+".

Hope this might help at least one poor soul out there, since it's been a couple days of hair-pulling for me. If nothing else, I'd stay away from the new Disk Utility for the time being.

[doublepost=1470079393][/doublepost]Thanks this is very useful info. I always try disc warrior before "getting under the hood" but nice to get thr full detail you gave. Now im just trying to format a new external drive i bought which disc util does not recognize. But it just came to me that i could try the format on another mac i have w el capitan. If no go i think my daughter's is still on Yosemite. Then its the forum for the drive maker

 

[Jihad]

You can use a hexeditor to make one simple edit on the Disk Utility from Yosemite, allowing it to run on El Capitan. (Run a google search, it's not difficult to find)
Just for compatibility sake, I recommend leaving the original (featureless, crap El Capitan version) where it is, and place the edited Disk Utility from Yosemite either in a different folder, or renamed to something else in the Utilities folder.
This hexedited diskutil will run in all versions of OSX (except 10.10). Enjoy

 

[jbarley]

This is the link I used to modify Yosemite Disk Utility to run on El-Cap.
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/restore-yosemite-disk-utility-on-el-capitan.180578/

 

[Ebenezum]

Since Sierra is released its seems that Apple won't fix El Capitan Disk Utility.

To add insult into injury Sierra won't support old Macs from 2007-2009 and I have no idea what Apple was thinking by not fixing Disk Utility bugs?

It looks like the intent is to push people replacing working Macs with new ones regardless of owners wishes...

 

[simon lefisch]

Terminal is your next option (and your best friend )

 

[Ebenezum]

I know. I can use use it if necessary but I absolutely detest CLI, i originally switched to Mac to get rid of things like Terminal...

 

[throAU]

I know. I can use use it if necessary but I absolutely detest CLI, i originally switched to Mac to get rid of things like Terminal...

Given virtually all macs now sold are single drive and SSD, there is very little reason to re-partition and if you're not competent enough to use the CLI then you probably shouldn't be messing with it.

 

[panzer06]

Given virtually all macs now sold are single drive and SSD, there is very little reason to re-partition and if you're not competent enough to use the CLI then you probably shouldn't be messing with it.

Seriously, I don't want to use CLI to do something as simple a format or partition a drive reliability. Since I regularly have issues with time machine backup drive filling up and not erasing what it needs to continue its gets real old fast having to manually delete files when a simple format or partition should work.

 

[Ebenezum]

Given virtually all macs now sold are single drive and SSD, there is very little reason to re-partition and if you're not competent enough to use the CLI then you probably shouldn't be messing with it.

As a owner of Mac Pro 2009 with several drives I'm pissed by this kind of short-sightedneds of Apple. Why remove features that are essential to customers?

As for the CLI every time I have to use it it means lots of cursing and dangerously high blood pressure! Why make things harder than they have to be?

 

[leman]

As a owner of Mac Pro 2009 with several drives I'm pissed by this kind of short-sightedneds of Apple. Why remove features that are essential to customers?

Dunno, for some reason I am able to repartition, resize and manage my disks with the new Disk Utikity just fine. There were certainly some shortcomings with the 10.11 version (window couldn't be resized etc), but weren't they fixed in sierra? What is it that you are still unable to do?