Disk Utility in Lion fixes "Core Storage Volume" naming in Yosemite

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Disk Utility in Lion fixes "Core Storage Volume" naming in Yosemite

i just wanted to report back that Partitioning a 4 TB (or presumably greater) drive in Lion (10.7.5) does in fact bring back the factory name for the drive (the "out-dented" volume name so that only the partition you are creating gets a name change.

in yosemite partitioning or erasing a drive with a new partition name creates a similarly named "out-dented" drive name which is basically almost literally etched in stone in that this "first partition name" will remain the "out-dented" name of this drive even if you reformat or re-parition the drive. this is mind-bogglingly dumb and complicated when you are using 4 disks with partitions and it becomes unmanageable very fast. this is especially problematic since yosemite cannot seem to show you /which/ bay the drive is in when you select it in DU when a drive was formatted like this - so basically you are relegated to literally writing on the drive or the computer or you have to pull drives to verify which is which.

anyway, i can confirm that partitioning the drive in Lion with a new partition name does in fact reclaim the factory "out-dented" name of the drive. also be advised that just erasing the drive does not work and will leave the "legacy 'first partition name' ".

not sure if that has been confirmed but wanted to report back.

cheers.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5), Boot Camp of Windows 7 + Windows XP

Posted on May 9, 2015 8:47 PM

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Answer 1

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Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

127,141 points

May 10, 2015 12:01 PM in response to hotwheels22

For Readers who get here by searching, hotwheels 22 is correct.

The Disk Utility ERASE bug applies to drives over 2.2TB, initialized as Internal drives, using 10.8.4 and later. Disk Utility ERASE seems to create a Logical Volume Group, and the rest of Disk Utility appears unable to do anything with the drive after than, including ERASE it again.

Disk Utility from any earlier version of Mac OS X, or Disk Utility from any Utilities/Installer Drive or the 10.6 DVD (provided your Mac can boot and run 10.6.3 from your 10.6 Installer/Utilities DVD) can generally be used to set it straight. One bit of interesting new information added is the suggestion that 10.7.5 cannot re-ERASE the drive in place.

Other solutions include doing a new ERASE in an External Enclosure (provided your enclosure is new enough to deal with drives over 2.2TB).

There is also a procedure for deleting the problem Logical Volume overhead, but it is a bit complex and requires Terminal commands. Some readers may find this too complicated.

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Answer 2

hotwheels22 Author

Level 1

74 points

May 10, 2015 12:16 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

hi grant.

thanks for clearing a lot of that up. also thanks for /all/ your help on this. i definitely found Terminal to be way too much trouble for this issue so doing this in Lion was really nice. i also find this to be basically a pretty bad bug which i would very much hope gets fixed for others.

one clarification on my end (let's see if i can get this to read correctly).

i /can/ erase my 4 TB and 6 TB drives in Lion. i then see the proper PARTITION name (the "in-dented one) and i see the proper factory drive name again (the "out-dented" one). but i see these in LION DU. HOWEVER, when i put this drive back into Yosemite DU - while i do see the correct new partition name - it doesn't show me the factory drive name it shows me the dumb name Yosemite first gave it (this is the same name as the first partition that the poor sap that owns this drive happen to give it when he first formatted it in yosemite, irrespective of anything he/she has done since).

so, i forgot to mention that what i did was get back into Lion DU and i ran an ERASE with a partition name of "test" and then i ran a PARTITION (from the Partition Tab) with the proper partition name as earlier. what i meant to say is that running a PARTITION (in this case with 1 partition selected) is the way to get back to the original drive name because simply doing an Erase doesn't do this.

/also/ in all three of my cases i am pretty sure i was not able to run a PARTITION on these drives since everything on this tab was greyed out and inaccessible. so it is actually /necessary/ to first run an ERASE (in my case with "test" as the partition name) and then i was able to select 1 Partition and partition as normal in the Partition tab in Lion.

at that point all looked great in Yosemite.

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