MacPro Hard Drive 3 TB or Larger formatted to Logical Volume Group by Disk Utility
This problem has been reported to occur on Intel MacPro's using internal drives from various manufactures with capacities >= 3 TB. Specifically, it's been reported when using Disk Utility in OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9).
Although there have been solutions involving using diskutil in Terminal posted here at AskDifferent and elsewhere on the web, I found a simpler solution: Format the disk using Disk Utility from an OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) Install DVD.
Warning: This solution will cause you to lose all data on the drive.
- Backup any valuable data from the drive in question.
- Reboot using the OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) Install DVD. (Hold down the C-Key to boot from the DVD.)
- Choose your language (eg. English).
- Instead of installing OS X, choose Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.
- Select your drive from the pane on the left of the Disk Utility screen.
- Choose the Partition tab.
- Select your desired Partition Layout.
- Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) under Format:
- Check the Options button and verify that GUID is selected as the partition scheme.
- Click the Apply button and verify you want to proceed.
- When the partition and format process is complete, quit Disk Utility and reboot.
The disk will now be correctly formatted using a GUID partition table.
(If you need to repartition or reformat the drive in the future, you will need to repeat this process. Hopefully Apple will fix this bug in a later version of Disk Utility.)