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High Sierra's Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks #

unless you click View > Show All Devices, quit Disk Utility, then relaunch it (thanks to xenadu02 for the workaround!)

Update: This issue appears to be resolved in macOS 10.13.3 / Disk Utility 17.0 (1635)

macOS 10.13's Disk Utility 17.0 (1626) does not recognize raw drives. Here is an example while booted from the installer, attempting to prepare a new internal drive:

However, as seen in the blue Terminal window, diskutil does recognize the drive. We'll use it to perform a quick, cursory format (e.g., diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ NewDisk GPT disk0 ) to make the disk appear in Disk Utility, where further modifications can more easily be made:

Plugging in an unformatted external drive produces the usual alert, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Initialize... | Ignore | Eject", but clicking Initialize just opens Disk Utility without the disk appearing:

As shown above, clicking View > Show All Devices does not cause the raw disk to appear.

UPDATE: Fans of Disk Utility's last classic version (13 (606) from OS X 10.10 Yosemite) have got it running in El Capitan and Sierra:

Disk Utility version 13 was the last to support:

Repairing permissions

Verifying disks

Software RAID

Burning optical discs (CDs and DVDs)

Dragging and dropping of disk images

However, in light of APFS and other changes, it may be wiser to simply use diskutil and hdiutil instead.

/mac | Oct 01, 2017

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