Is Mountain Lion mishandling large drives?

Hard drives are easily surpassing 3TB storage capacities, either individually or when used in RAID arrays, and have become attractive options for external storage on various Mac users, not only for various data libraries (i.e., iTunes and iPhoto), but also for Time Machine backups. However, some people have encountered an apparent bug in which using some drives in Mountain Lion results in partitioning errors and the inability to access data on the drives.

When the problems happen, the drive becomes inaccessible, and when checking with Disk Utility users will see an error that states, "Error: Partition map repair failed while adjusting structures to fit current whole disk size," which crops up even though no partitioning of the drive has been performed.

In some instances the drive works fine after repartitioning and formatting, but in other cases Mountain Lion's Disk Utility will not work with the drives even though users have had success in using Disk Utility from prior versions of OS X on these same drives.

Apple discussion poster Avendanio writes:

I have tried reformatting my 2TB iOmega but it still doesn't work. I connected it to 10.7 Lion and ran disk utility which reported no errors. I reformatted and connected it to 10.8.2. It worked! However, after doing the initial backup it reports that it cannot backup to the damaged disk. Disk Utility on 10.8.2 reports 'Error:... [Read more]