To confirm that this is the issue, open the terminal app (applications>utilities>terminal) and enter 'diskutil list' (without the quotation marks). This will show a list of all the drives that are connected. If your problem is like ours, the disk will still only show ONE PARTITION at this time, however this is technically incorrect due to that partition table (GUID Partition Map versus Master Boot Record).

This is crucial so that you can change the partition table or 'SCHEME'. This allows you to erase/format the DRIVE and not the VOLUME. Go to view in the menu bar, then check 'Show all Devices'.

Open the disk utility app (applications>utilities>disk utility) Here is the process that worked for me (finally). I also figured out that they changed the disk utility app awhile back to only show volumes instead of devices. In fact, it showed that the device only had one partition. My disk utility also did not show that EFI bootup partition.