Name your drive, select a filesystem, then click “Erase.” Just like that, you’ve formatted your drive. There it is! Select the drive, then click the “Erase” button to format it. So where’s the fix? In the menu bar-click View > Show All Devices.Ĭlick this and you’ll see all inserted devices, regardless of whether they are formatted or not. That’s not very ideal in this circumstance, especially since the popup about the unformatted drive is what brought us here in the first place. This means any empty drive-any drive without formatted partitions, that is-won’t show up at all. This is because Disk Utilitiy’s default is to only show formatted volumes. This isn’t exactly the kind of clear, user-friendly language you’d expect from Apple, is it? And it gets weirder: if you click “Initialize”, Disk Utility opens-which makes sense-but as of this writing does not show drives without partitions by default. Insert such a disk and you’ll see an error message: “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” There are three options: “Eject,” “Ignore,” and “Initialize.” You might think this means it can’t be used to create partitions on new disks, which is frustrating, but you can solve this problem with one click. Any other suggestions? For the record I'm working with a 2008 desktop with the exact same El Capitan system as the OP.The macOS Disk Utility, by default, will not show you an empty, unformatted drive. I've tried this and none of them seemed to help, I still get stuck with the loading whenever I click on "disk utilities" when in OS X Recovery mode. As soon as I did, the drive re-started itself and voila, everything started working as expected.
So, I decided to try killing that process first with the sudo command ("super user do"). When I ran yqan's command, I saw one line (in red above - my emphasis) contained "disk2s0", which is my machine's name for the DVD drive (your machine may be different).
So, I launched Disk Utility and had the same "Loading Disks" problem you all had, which brought me here. It seemed to want to read it but then the disk never showed up in Finder. Note to others: The "layman's" explanation for what happened was that I inserted a CD into the drive. I suggest using Ethernet if possible because it is three times faster than wireless. Note : You will need an active Internet connection. Select Reinstall OS X from the Utilities menu, and click on the Continue button. Reinstall OS X: Reboot from the Recovery HD. Wait until the operationĬompletes, then quit Disk Utility and returnto the main menu.Ĥ. Click on the First Aid button in the toolbar. Indented Macintosh HDentry from the the left side list. When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility and press the Continue button. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions as follows. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions: Upon startup select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. If this doesn't help, then:īoot to the Recovery HD: Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down theĬOMMAND and R keys until the Utilities menu screen appears.ģ. Restart the computer in Safe Mode, then restart again, normally. Intel-based Macs: Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)Ģ. Try these in order testing your system after each to see if it's back to normal:ġ.