How to reformat usb drive using mac

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Format an External Hard Drive or USB Flash Drive for Mac OS X

Get a deep discount on a lifetime subscription. Future Apple Watches may be flexible and sport a magnetic wristband. Insert the flash drive or hard drive you want to format for Windows compatibility.

Select the drive you want to format. Click the Erase button.

Choose the former if the size of the disk is 32 GB or less. Choose the latter if the size of the disk is over 32 GB.

Enter a name for the volume no more than 11 characters. Click Erase, then click Done. OmniFocus a solid task management Notable apps and app updates for The overwhelming majority of USB flash drives you buy are going to come in one of two formats: If the drive comes formatted in NTFS, which is the default file system for Windows, you're going to want to re-format the drive because Mac OS X can't write files to NTFS-formatted volumes at least not without a bunch of extra work that's beyond the scope of this article.

How do you tell which format your brand-new USB drive has?

How to reformat a usb drive to its full c… - Apple Community

Hook it up to your Mac and launch the Disk Utility app, located in your Utilities folder which is in Applications. Your new drive should appear in the left-hand column, and clicking the "Partition" tab will bring up info on the drive which includes its current format. There are several possible file system formats you can use for a USB flash drive, and changing them in Disk Utility is as easy as selecting the number of partitions you want on the drive usually just one , picking the format you want for the drive, and clicking "Apply.

Unless you have extraordinary needs, you can safely ignore two of them: I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the other three formats below. Formatting your USB flash drive this way will give you full interoperability with Macs. You can even set up an OS X startup drive if you have the right files, the know-how, and a big enough flash drive, which will allow you to boot your Mac off an external disk if something goes wrong with your built-in drive. The "Mac OS Extended Journaled " option will have the highest degree of support for Mac OS X features, and there's no limit to the size of files you can put on the drive.

Windows-running PCs can read files from drives formatted this way, but they can't write to them at least not without the same amount of work it takes to get OS X to write to NTFS-formatted drives. Otherwise, you may need to consider one of the file formats discussed below. FAT32 offers near-universal interoperability with virtually every computing system on the planet.

A drive formatted this way can easily transfer files between Macs and PCs. You can also move files to video game systems like the PlayStation 3, Xbox , and Wii.

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Virtually all cameras and videocameras support FAT32, too. It's the closest thing we have to a universal file system format, which is why most flash drives are formatted this way right out of the box. FAT32 doesn't support files larger than 4 GB, and that's its greatest drawback.

You also can't create a startup drive for your Mac using this format. Furthermore, FAT32 doesn't support OS X Lion's Versions feature -- something users have discovered the hard way when working directly off of files stored on a USB flash drive something we recommend against doing. However, those downsides may be more than outweighed by FAT32's near-universal support, and if you don't think you're going to be dealing with files bigger than 4 GB, this may be the optimal choice.