

The listed volumes should correspond to the local volumes that show up on your Mac’s desktop, or in the Finder sidebar. In the Disk Utility sidebar, you’ll see the list of items change to only show individual volumes. You can also select Show Only Volumes from Disk Utility’s View menu. To select this option: The default view, Show Only Volumes, will display only properly formatted devices and can prevent unformatted disks from appearing in Disk Utility’s sidebar.įrom Disk Utility’s toolbar, click the View button and select Show Only Volumes from the dropdown menu. This is the Disk Utility default and will only display properly formatted volumes.
#Check space on macbook update
You can switch between them at any time, and Disk Utility will update the display immediately no need to close and reopen the Disk Utility app or restart your Mac. Tip: When we speak of unformatted drives, we’re including any disk that uses a format that your Mac can’t natively work with.ĭisk Utility lets you pick which display mode to work in: Volumes only, All Devices, or only a selected drive. This includes working with unformatted drives as well as unformatted USB flash drives. The disadvantage, however, is that it can make it difficult to work with new unformatted disks you may be using for the first time. This makes using Disk Utility with existing volumes an easy task since there are only a few, and sometimes only one, volumes displayed, cutting down on what could be an overwhelming list of disks, containers, volumes, RAID slices, etc. Selecting the Initialize button will open Disk Utility, but the disk may not show up if the apps view settings are in the default settings.ĭisk Utility is configured by default to only show formatted volumes.

“The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer”.
#Check space on macbook how to
We’ll also demonstrate how to use Terminal to access the remaining hidden disk structures that Disk Utility can’t view directly, including: In this Rocket Yard article, we’re going to look at how to enable Disk Utility to view and work with the types of disk spaces you’re likely to encounter, including: In versions of Disk Utility that came with OS X Yosemite and earlier, you could enable hidden debug modes in the Disk Utility app that allowed you to see and interact with all the space on a disk, including hidden elements, such as the Recovery volume or the secret EFI partitions.

Disk Utility, the macOS Swiss Army knife for working with disks and storage volumes, may have a few blades missing, especially when it comes to working with unformatted drives and unused space on a disk or storage volume.
