disk utility bug el capitan, partition greyed out

Question

ppithermo Author

Level 1

29 points

disk utility bug el capitan, partition greyed out

system 10 11.1 (El Capitan)

I wanted to partition a 2Tb external disk.

Disk partition has been revamped.

looks like it is not finished yet!!

The instructions given by apple simply do not work.

The disk brand, western digital, my passport ultra USB 3.

The partition button remains desperately greyed out .

I tried erasing the disk reformatting it to a different format, just in case.

Simply would not get the partition button out of the grey!!!

My solution was.

I booted on a mountain lion external disk. The old disk utility did work like a charm and I could partition easily, extend journaled, GUID.

Note that after having created my 2 partitions , if in el capitan, disk utility, I select the disk with the 2 partitions, the partition button is no longer greyed out.

Apple please fix this. if you know how to tell them...

Thanks

various macs-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Nov 25, 2015 8:16 AM

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Answer 1

JamiRae

Level 1

9 points

Sep 3, 2017 3:06 PM in response to ppithermo

thanks for this.. what a pain! had to erase/format several times as well before the partition became active. Even got errors on the Erase function then simply did an Erase again and it worked. so bizarre, but at least it worked!

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Answer 2

Nov 25, 2015 8:39 AM in response to ppithermo

You seem to have missed how partition works in Disk Utility in El Capitan. It is slightly different, but it DOES work.

1) You need to select the Disk itself, not the volume(s) inside the disk (this was also true before El Capitan). Notice the Partition button is active:

2) If the partitions use up all the space, you need to clear space, by either dragging to reduce the size of a partition, or by deleting a partition outright using the "-" button. In the picture below, the second of four partitions is selected. If I pressed "-", it would be deleted, leaving empty space. I could then extend the first partition to use that space, for example.

3) I don't have a disk available to illustrate, but after erasing a drive completely, you can click the partition button, reduce the size of the single partition that was created, and then click the "+" button to add more partitions, as you see fit.

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