OS X El Capitan's Disk Utility is a mess

[Jethro!]

This new version of DU is deeply disturbing. Hopefully Apple adds back some features for power users - or at least adds a power user mode (like the old debug mode) to bring them back. I guess a power user can always drop back to the terminal commands that were behind DU, but it was certainly nice to have these capabilities with a GUI. I make use of the old DU multiple times per week so I will wait to fully upgrade to El Cap. (installed it in a test partition to try it out) in hopes that this gets "fixed".

I agree. The new DU is shockingly dumbed-down. More importantly, it appears much less useful than the old version.

Apple, quit progressively "stupidizing" your OS!!

 

[kironin]

Okay, I'm stumped. Since upgrading to El Capitan, I've been unable to view files on an encrypted sparse disk image. I was finally able to mount it and get it to prompt me for the password. Seems to accept the password okay. I can see the disk image in the Disk Utility. I can run First Aid on it successfully, no issues. I can pull information window up, looks okay. However the Finder window does not show the disk image and I do not seem to be able to actually access the files at all. I can unmount it from Disk Utility -- woo woo. I guess I'm stuck rebooting in Yosemite from an external disk to be able to open the image and recover the files. What the hell apple?

 

[ticotoo]

Okay, I'm stumped. Since upgrading to El Capitan, I've been unable to view files on an encrypted sparse disk image. I was finally able to mount it and get it to prompt me for the password. Seems to accept the password okay. I can see the disk image in the Disk Utility. I can run First Aid on it successfully, no issues. I can pull information window up, looks okay. However the Finder window does not show the disk image and I do not seem to be able to actually access the files at all. I can unmount it from Disk Utility -- woo woo. I guess I'm stuck rebooting in Yosemite from an external disk to be able to open the image and recover the files. What the hell apple?

Thats another gotcha. I was having trouble also. Try unlocking the disk after mounting & add it unlock icon on the toolbar.

 

[Josemari7]

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.

Thank you for sharing this experience. Here's my 'bad experience' and still looking for a solution. My 1T extHDD once was good for my Mac and playing all my mp4 files on an LG flatscreen. I can edit readily my file until I upgraded my OS to El Capitan. The result, I can't edit this ext.HDD now. Can only copy. It's now good for windows use? I can fix this without erasing valuable data. Disk Utility on offers: ERASE and UNMOUNT. S.O.S. With this hard drive I didn't use the Time Machine to back it up. Would appreciate a simpler way of bringing back my Ext.HDD back to normal.

Thanks!
Josemari7

 

[The-Pro]

What was wrong with the old version of disk utility? Everyone knew how to use it, it was the same for so many years and had all the functionality you could wish for.
Its like there are too many employees who don't know what to do so they are given tasks like redesign disk utility just to keep them busy.
Frustrating!

 

[Mr. Wonderful]

What was wrong with the old version of disk utility? Everyone knew how to use it, it was the same for so many years and had all the functionality you could wish for.
Its like there are too many employees who don't know what to do so they are given tasks like redesign disk utility just to keep them busy.
Frustrating!

This is my question. Is this part of some sort of long-term plan for disk storage and file systems or something? Most normal users aren't even going to access Disk Utility in the first place unless instructed to by a Power User friend or online article, and even then, the GUI was incredibly simple.

 

[flowrider]

This is good reading:

http://www.macworld.com/article/298...age-devices-gets-a-facelift.html#tk.nl_mwbest

Lou

 

[indiekiduk]

Came across this thread today when I was unable to re-partition a windows disk that had an NTFS partition as a OS X extended journaled. When I selected the disk and clicked the partition button first an alert appeared underneath the disk utility window that said journaled mode must be enabled for the disk to allow resizing the partition. This was strange because not only is journaled greyed out but I wasn't trying to resize the partition I was just brining up the partition editing window. In this window when I chose OS X Extended Journaled I first couldn't type in a volume name because it was greyed out so by selecting a different type and back to the one want it enabled the text field. However clicking apply threw the error:

"mediakit reports not enough space on device for requested operation"

I consequently gave up and plugged the disk into a mac running Yosemite and performed the required partition and format in less than 10 seconds.

 

[Ebenezum]

What was wrong with the old version of disk utility? Everyone knew how to use it, it was the same for so many years and had all the functionality you could wish for.
Its like there are too many employees who don't know what to do so they are given tasks like redesign disk utility just to keep them busy.
Frustrating!

I agree 100%!

While removing RAID isn't a huge problem for me because I could easily move to SoftRaid I am extremely angry that Apple removes this kind of function without any warning and even less reason. Why not include these options in a separate menu option in Disk Utility, it would not confuse novises while keeping needed functionality for those who need them?

Is this part of some sort of long-term plan for disk storage and file systems or something?

I am not sure but I am starting to wonder if Apples long term plan is to remove all file system access from user and effectively turn OS X into slightly more advanced version of iOS?


While I am currently using Yosemite which has its problems upgrading into El Capitan is not very tempting because of dumping down of options even more than Yosemite (Disk Utility, removal of Secure Erase, pointless additional software that cannot be removed without disabling SIP (Photos I am looking at you!), etc.

I am seriously considering going back to Mavericks because all my software works in it without problems and 10.10-10.11 offer no compelling reasons for me to use them.

 

[jakebrosy]

I agree 100%!

While removing RAID isn't a huge problem for me because I could easily move to SoftRaid I am extremely angry that Apple removes this kind of function without any warning and even less reason. Why not include these options in a separate menu option in Disk Utility, it would not confuse novises while keeping needed functionality for those who need them?
...
I am seriously considering going back to Mavericks because all my software works in it without problems and 10.10-10.11 offer no compelling reasons for me to use them.

So, I took time to submit a bug report to Apple. Unfortunately, the morons in Cupertino, believe DiskUtility is working just fine. I'm keeping an iMac with Yosemite until they get this sorted out. What a clusterf*ck!

Thank you for contacting us.

For issues that are not bugs, please contact our Feedback teams at:

http://www.apple.com/contact/

We are closing this report.

If you have questions regarding the resolution of this issue, please update your bug report with that information.

Please be sure to regularly check new Apple releases for any updates that might affect this issue.

++++++++ MY BUG REPORT +++++++++++

The new Disk Utility is so dumbed down as to be almost useless.

When resizing small partitions, the previous version of Disk Utility had a large easy-to-manipulate area for manipulating partition sizes. Or even better you could create the number of partitions you need, then type a partition size into the window and the adjacent partition would resize to fill the space.

With this version the stupid little popup containing the partition name obscures the silly little handle you have to grab to resize the partition. And, if like before, you choose to type the partition size a NEW partition appears, rather than resizing adjacent partitions. WTF?!?!?

This is particularly frustrating when creating multiple specific-sized partitions. So frustrating as to make the now iOS-ed Disk Utility unusable.


​

 

[Rob.G]

I just discovered this idiotic new change today. I needed to resize the partition on my external 4tb drive (from 300 gig to 500 gig) for my new Carbon Copy Cloner partition to backup my laptop, since I just sold my Mac mini today. This would have been easy in the old Disk Utility. I've spent an hour with the new one and gave up.

For one, there seems to be no way to actually delete the 300 gig volume (partition?) or resize it. I resized the larger one that holds all my other files just fine... backed it down to 3.5 tb. But that left me with ANOTHER 200 gig partition on top of my backup one. I can resize the 3.5tb one back up to 3.7 and it removes that volume (partition?) but won't let me resize the other one.

It also complains that you can't resize it because it's not journaled. So I set that up... I erase it with journaling enabled, etc, etc. But it still won't let me drag the resize thing in the stupid pie chart even though there's a drag handle.

This is THE most idiotic thing Apple has done in a long time. Who the hell approved this??? I'm gonna have to find a Windows or a Linux machine to do this now. Grrr.

 

[Rob.G]

Followup:

I hadn't disconnected my Mac mini yet, so I plugged the external drive into it and booted it up. It took me about THIRTY SECONDS with the old Disk Utility to do what I needed to do. I'm going to contact Apple on this one too. Holy cow what were they thinking...

Oh, I copied the Yosemite DiskUtility app over and naturally it wouldn't run.

 

[m4v3r1ck]

This is good reading:

http://www.macworld.com/article/298...age-devices-gets-a-facelift.html#tk.nl_mwbest

Lou

A good read indeed Lou! Thanks for sharing.

Cheers

 

[The-Pro]

I also noticed it doesn't always show all the partitions.
for example, I have my 5TB, 3 partition HDD, connected and all three partitions are mounted on my desktop (on a different not it takes me 10mins to mount the drive, it just doesn't want to mount, thats posted in another el capitan issues thread though.) Anyway, one partition is 750GB and NTFS formatted (tuxera ntfs is installed in trial mode atm). However disk utility doest list this partition. It just does not seem to exist for disk utility.
Also I have noticed disk utility no longer display connected but unmounted volumes. Like for real?
geeez

 

[Joerg McFly]

I also noticed it doesn't always show all the partitions.
for example, I have my 5TB, 3 partition HDD, connected and all three partitions are mounted on my desktop (on a different not it takes me 10mins to mount the drive, it just doesn't want to mount, thats posted in another el capitan issues thread though.) Anyway, one partition is 750GB and NTFS formatted (tuxera ntfs is installed in trial mode atm). However disk utility doest list this partition. It just does not seem to exist for disk utility.
Also I have noticed disk utility no longer display connected but unmounted volumes. Like for real?
geeez

I'm having the same problem (NTFS partition with Win 10 on it not showing up in Disk Utility - I've got Paragon NTFS, their latest El Capitan compatible version, installed and running) - funnily enough, the partition WILL show up in Recovery Mode. But that uses the same version of Disk Utility (15.0 / 1150) as far as I can see - doesn't seem to make sense now, does it?

 

[The-Pro]

I'm having the same problem (NTFS partition with Win 10 on it not showing up in Disk Utility - I've got Paragon NTFS, their latest El Capitan compatible version, installed and running) - funnily enough, the partition WILL show up in Recovery Mode. But that uses the same version of Disk Utility (15.0 / 1150) as far as I can see - doesn't seem to make sense now, does it?

Interesting
You mean when you start your mac in recovery mode the disk utility detects it?
Are you also having problems with it mounting?

 

[justusbeyer]

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.

It is possible to continue using the old Disk Utility by patching out its system version check. I wrote a blog post about it (https://justus.berlin/2015/10/restore-old-disk-utility-in-os-x-el-capitan/). However, so far I only tested it by writing ISO images on a DVD (which works great) but didn't modify hard disks.

 

[Joerg McFly]

Interesting
You mean when you start your mac in recovery mode the disk utility detects it?

Exactly. No other mounting problems, though, as far as I can see.
EDIT: It just dawned on me that having a DIY Fusion Drive might have something to do with it, with the Windows partition on SSD.

 

[The-Pro]

Exactly. No other mounting problems, though, as far as I can see.
EDIT: It just dawned on me that having a DIY Fusion Drive might have something to do with it, with the Windows partition on SSD.

Actually my Windows 7 bootcamp partition isn't showing up either!

interestingly enough, have a look at the file I attached. No idea why its showing that all of a sudden. I haven't downloaded anything nor can I find those files

 

[GuillemV]

Disk Util from ElCapitan killed my drive.
For real.
What a mess.
I was at the point of taking it to service but I could finally fix it typing in Terminal as per forum's posts of people with same issue.

But I gotta Share this. I just tried to erase my partition to install OSX10.11 from scratch and it killed it. I've lost like 4 hours of my Sunday and good I was doing it today so tomorrow it's ready for work. But I'm starting to hate a new OSX again and I haven't run it yet :-/

 

[Pop11]

There's something wrong with disk image creation in the new Disk Utility. I try to create a new blank image of 4.6GB (OSX Extended Journaled / 128-bit encryption / CD-DVD partitions / sparse bundle) and the image that's created and mounted has a capacity of only 1.14GB, according to the Finder. Happens every time.

I'm having to use DropDMG as a replacement.

 

[Nicholas Savage]

Yeah. This new GUI has all the design quirks that made me hate Windows for years. And my complaints here are after just looking at it for 2 minutes, not trying to actually use it for anything. . .I haven't even had a chance to find out how well it breaks volumes as many of the rest of you seem to have experienced.

- It opens with a window that can't display it's own contents without vertical scrolling. 12-14 items; devices or partitions max basically on the side bar.

- The sidebar can't be expanded right to show full names of attached devices; necessitating use of info command.

- No ability to resize main window.

- The 'info' cmd-I window opens in the same place at a size too small to show it's contents. Every-Single-Time.

I have to use Disk Utility on a daily basis to deal with client computers. . .and they have royally peeved me off with this GUI change. I feel like I am using WinXP. Did anyone even bother to test usability on this thing before they went GM? CLI diskutil is officially more convenient now for just about everything. . .which is ridiculous.

Ugh.

 

[ABC5S]

This is my question. Is this part of some sort of long-term plan for disk storage and file systems or something? Most normal users aren't even going to access Disk Utility in the first place unless instructed to by a Power User friend or online article, and even then, the GUI was incredibly simple.

Yup. I just turn my system on, and use it. Never go into disk utility.....Ever

 

[Nicholas Savage]

Yup. I just turn my system on, and use it. Never go into disk utility.....Ever

And when those of us who are Apple Techs need to fix your computer : We rather enjoy having a Disk Utility that works. There is no sane reason why I should have to drop to the CLI's diskutil for simple tasks. Or to do so to deal with common issues on FAT / EXFAT stuff (Like camera memory cards). The Drive Setup tool on Mac OS 9 had a more powerful partitioning GUI.

 

[Fangio]

It is possible to continue using the old Disk Utility by patching out its system version check. I wrote a blog post about it (https://justus.berlin/2015/10/restore-old-disk-utility-in-os-x-el-capitan/). However, so far I only tested it by writing ISO images on a DVD (which works great) but didn't modify hard disks.

Works for me. Will have to do some further tests too, anyway great find. Thanks