The bugs in the macOS Sierra 10.12.2

John Galt wrote:

3. If in Pages the colour panel is opened and the URL address os web page is copied from Safari into the Pages document then it is imposable to change the colour of the wed address stroke. You need to reopen the colour panel and then you can change of the colour of the wed address stroke.

I'm afraid I don't understand that question.

I'm trying to understand that question, but I can't duplicate it either.

I understand, however not everyone is technically minded and of course everyone gets frustrated with technology from time to time. I have to admit as a developer of some 30+ years I become flabbergasted that some apparently unmodified components of the operating system suddenly fail with blazingly obvious faults between releases. This can lead to people blowing off steam. Patience and understanding is the key.

My experience of the drive formatting problem is as follows.

I use mainly Seagate 2.5 inch drives with USB connections, 1TB size, however I see the same issue with Flash Thumb drives.

Once a drive has been inserted and Disk Manager loaded you typically see the device on the left had panel in a 2 tier tree arrangement with the hardware device as the parent and the partition as the child.

If I select the partition and run the erase function it works fine. If I select the top level device and then click format I get an error. Erase process has failed. Click Done to continue.

The partition element of the tree becomes greyed out and unavailable. At this point the best way to recover is to physically remove the device, reconnect and then repeat the procedure only instead of selecting the top level device, this time erase the partition.

1. Disk utility in Mas OS Sierra can not format USB external HD or flash in native Mac format.

Sure it can. To learn how to use Disk Utility please read Disk Utility for Mac: Erase a volume using Disk Utility.

2. Quick Time does not remember volume. In each opening of Quick Time the volume is maximum.

That doesn't happen on my Macs. QuickTime Player remembers its volume setting.

3. If in Pages the colour panel is opened and the URL address os web page is copied from Safari into the Pages document then it is imposable to change the colour of the wed address stroke. You need to reopen the colour panel and then you can change of the colour of the wed address stroke.

I'm afraid I don't understand that question.

4. In Finder when you press Alt and select any file or folder you can not see "green +" symbol near the icon. The "green +" symbol is appeared only when you move icon.

As far as I know, that has always been the case. Pressing an Option key does nothing until you actually move an icon, indicating that you want to create a copy of the selected item. Excerpted from Mac keyboard shortcuts - Apple Support (boldface added):

nikolay51 wrote:

1. Disk utility in Mas OS Sierra can not format USB external HD or flash in native Mac format.

As I wrote, it can, but in the case of flash memory DU might decide the device is not responding fast enough and require that you try again.

Read this post: Disk Utility bugs - macOS Sierra 10.12.2.

Dave,

FWIW, this may not mean anything but I just connected an old WD USB2 500GB external to my MacBook Air running 10.12.2 and had no problem formatting it. That doesn't mean there can't be an issue with USB3 drives, although I can't replicate the problem with USB3 flash drives. Unfortunately I don't have a USB3 external I can spare to test.

You may want contact Apple and report it as a bug just in case.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

The vast majority of upgrade complaints are due to ill-conceived system modifications such as non-Apple "anti-virus" junk and various "cleaning" scams. A Mac unaffected by them will work the way it's supposed to work.

Lacking more information regarding your system I can't be more specific than that.

1. Yes, it can.

2. It seems to maintain the volume if you allow it to reopen files left open when you quit.

3. I can't replicate that.

4. Yes, the copy/alias badge is only relevant when you drop, so unless the file is moved, there is no point in putting up the badge.

1. Disk utility in Mas OS Sierra can not format USB external HD or flash in native Mac format.

I have found that if I select the drive rather than the partition when I use the Erase option it fails part way through the process. I then have to disconnect the drive physically - reconnect it and then retry.

Well I'm very pleased you can - however that does not help the person with the problem. In fact there seem to be a great many people responding in a unhelpful manner which makes me wonder why they bother posting at all.

FWIW, usually people trying to help with no other information than "it doesn't work" are hard pressed to provide help. If you could give a little more detail such as what sort of drives, any error messages, etc. It would help.

Dave, I did forget to mention that when reformatting one of the USB Flash drives that was formatted as a FAT16 drive, Disk Utility did fail the first time. However, I just pressed "Erase" a second time after it failed and it formatted as a Mac drive just fine.

If you want to reformat a drive then yes, you would select the "Parent". If it fails, I would try what worked for me with one USB Flash drive which was to run "Erase" a second time and see how that works. Are the drives plugged into a hub or directly into the Mac?

I was using the flash drive as an example - however I have a set of 5 standard 1TB USB hard disks which I rotate through and make bootable clones of my hard disk with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. The disks all exhibit the same glitchyness when formatting. Once formatted they work find and I can actually boot from them and run Sierra, it's just the format process which is problematic. Also I've had these drives some time, going back to Yosemite and they always used to format fine until I got to Sierra.

I only observed that problem with flash memory drives. Not that it should matter though, DU should work even if they are slow. The problem might even be isolated to certain Mac models.

Did you try resetting the SMC?

I don't get it either John…