Issue formatting Seagate external in High Sierra

Okay, here is what I did.

1. I disconnected the unmounted (grayed out) 2T WD Elements drive.

2. Then I reconnected the 2T WD drive. Dialog box popped which said that the MacOS (10.13.1) could not read the drive, did I want to initialize it. Clicked "Yes" or "OK" and up popped Disk Utility.

3. Under "View" in Disk Utility, I selected, "Show All Devices"

4. Now the WD Elements was shown with "Untitled" beneath it.

5. Took Disk Utility's suggestion as to format, and after about a minute, it was formatted and mounted.

Here's what I did:

1. I disconnected the power to my unmounted (grayed out) 4T Seagate Backup Plus Hub drive.

2. Then I powered up the 4T Seagate drive. Dialog box popped which said that the drive could not be read, I clicked "Initialize..." and this loaded Disk Utility.

3. Under "View" in Disk Utility, select "Show All Devices"

4. The Seagate physical drive was shown with my previous attempts at partitioning grayed out below.

5. I clicked on the physical drive (NOT the drive partitions below!) and selected "Erase" (NOT "Partition"!) from the tabs above.

6. I just allowed Disk Utility to select the drive format type as you did and clicked OK. The drive was formatted as you would expect (finally).

7. I then selected the drive and used "Partition" to set up the drive to use APFS.

You were my inspiration though! Thanks!

I went to Seagate knowledge FAQ website , got below information and it works !!

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/007736en

How to format your drive in macOS 10.11 and above

Note: Reformatting the drive will erase all data on the drive, so you should copy any data you want off the drive prior to formatting.

The following is based on the latest version of macOS.

1. Open Disk Utility
Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility

2. Select the Seagate drive on the left.

Note: If you don’t see two entries listed then change the view in disk utility to show the drive and the volume. The view button is in the upper left-hand side, change to Show All devices. This feature was introduced in macOS 10.13 and not available in 10.11 or 10.12.

3. Select Erase which opens the following window.

4. Rename the drive
5. Select OS X Extended (Journaled) for Format
6. Select GUID Partition Map for Scheme
Note: If you do not see the scheme option, then you have selected the volume and not the drive. Click on the view button in the upper left-hand side, change to Show All Devices. Select the non-indented entry for your Seagate drive.

Warning: Formatting the drive will erase all data on the drive, so you should copy any data you want off the drive prior to formatting.

7. Select Erase again.
8. Disk Utility will start formatting the drive.

9. Once complete, click done.

Hello jibberj, just bought a WD Element 2TB external hard drive and experiencing the same problem, with same error message. I have followed both Apple and WD formatting instructions but nothing works....

Actually, the screenshot you sent is exactly the one if you have not activated Show All Devices, but only the Show Only Volumes option in the View Dropdown (there are subtle differences. For example, you wouldn't see Macintosh HD, but the drive denomination, and not the used quantity , but the smart status, etc). So, as I see it, Eau Rouge was the right path form start on.
Has High Sierra introduced as default the view volumes only option? what for, to protect a user form himself who has found its way to disk utility?

This worked for me - download Paragon NTFS from the Seagate site.

Install it and run the program, then plug in your Seagate Drive. You can then mount it in the app. After you mount it once, you can see it in the Finder again, and unmount it. When I plugged it back it, the hard drive mounted back to normal (without having to go through the Paragon App)

http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/backup-p lus-desk/ntfs-driver-for-mac-os-master-dl/

This worked for me - download Paragon NTFS from the Seagate site.

Install it and run the program, then plug in your Seagate Drive. You can then mount it in the app. After you mount it once, you can see it in the Finder again, and unmount it. When I plugged it back it, the hard drive mounted back to normal (without having to go through the Paragon App)

http://www.seagate.com/support/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/backup-p lus-desk/ntfs-driver-for-mac-os-master-dl/

I had the same issue. Happened with two different new 4 TB Seagate drives. Same problem whether I used APFS or macOS extended and journaled. Solved the problem by using my old laptop which still runs Yosemite. No problem formatting to macOS extended and journaled. Was then able to reformat as APFS under High Sierra.

Have you activated Show All Devices in the Disk Utility sidebar. Click on View on the menubar and click on Show All Devices. Now select the Disk not the Volume to format the drive.

Same problem here with a WD 2T external. 😠 Any word from Apple?

Thank you David, I had actually a friend over this week-end and being an IT geek it sorted my troubles out in 2 min but he did some coding in the background....

Yes. I thought about doing it via command line in Terminal, but I was happy to see that David's solution worked. Avoided all those keystrokes 🙂

Thank you for this, but it's hard to understand why the "view all" option isn't the default!!

Well, I guess to protect the users from themselves, although they got this deep. Absurd "windows-thinking"...