El Capitan Problem with Disk Utility and USB Drive Partitioning

I was able to get around this issue by booting into fedora linux and using gparted to set the partition table to GPT and creating one partition of hfs+. Then I could see the partition button lit up.

I was able to resolve this issue by reformatting my HD ( via Windows 7). Afterward el Capitan / Disk Utility was able to partition it.

Same problem with any USB devices with more than one partition. Nothing works under El Capitan! Not only disk utility, but also Finder, Terminal commands, and Applications are all affected. That makes it more difficult for me to prepare media for Raspberry Pi - USB sticks and SD cards. But on the same Macbook I have Ubuntu running in a Parallels virtual machine, and that (fortunately) works OK with these multi-partition USB devices.

IS this bug solved?

i walked around the problem with Rufus first to format exfat then reformat agin from disk utility

Solved? No. I work around it with Ubuntu. And though the earlier 'ApplePi-Baker' failed to work with El Capitan for preparing disk images, the update to 'ApplePi-Baker-2' is fine. (The creator's blog outlines the story of what he had to do to accommodate the El Capitan changes)

Hi,

I had this same problem but I managed to fix it by:

Formatting the disk using the format exFAT at first

Then formatting the disk again in the format you want (you should now be able to choose the scheme too)

I then chose OS X Extended (case sensitive, journaled, encrypted)

Chose the scheme GUID Partition Map

Setup my password (blah blah blah...)

AND DONE!!

Hi there,

Here's my quick fix:

1. Open Disk Utility and select your USB stick.
   
2. look for the "Device:" label on the bottom left and note which disk your USB stick is. I am using disk5 in my example.
   
3. Open up Terminal and issue the following command where you replace "disk5" with your disk and Installer with whatever name you want your partition to be called.
   sudo diskutil partitionDisk disk5 1 jhfs+ Installer R
   WARNING! THERE IS NO CONFIRMATION AFTER THIS. IT WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR DISK.
   (The command tells diskutility to partition the disk named disk5 and create 1 journaled hfs+ partition named Installer and use all the available ("R for remaining") space.)
4. Disk Utility should now recognise your USB stick correctly.

Hope this helps.

You win. Thank you

In High Sierra, there is an option in the View menu for Show All Devices (command + 2). This would allow you to partition the device however you like.