How to Format a USB Flash Drive with Mac to FAT32
Yes, connecting an external hard drive or USB flash key to a Mac will generally read and work fine as is because the Mac can easily read other filesystem formats, including Windows MSDOS, FAT, FAT32, ExFat, and NTFS formats, but unless you intend on using the drive between a Windows and Mac machine, formatting it to be entirely Mac compatible filesystem is highly recommended, and necessary for Time Machine and to make disks bootable. For example, in Windows XP 'My Computer' is equivalent to 'This PC' on Windows 10. Step 1: Locate your USB stick under 'This PC', right click on it and select the 'Format' option. Sep 13, 2018 September 13, 2018 September 13. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to format an External Hard Disk or a USB Flash Drive on Mac. This would be an unnecessary step if you wish to use your external hard disk or USB flash drive interchangeably between Windows and Mac devices. This procedure is exclusively for using these drives.
Many computer users who use a removable flash drive have the demand for formatting it to the FAT32 file system. Compare with the other commonly used NTFS file system on a flash drive, FAT32 has a compatibility advantage across many operating systems.
It's a universal format that is compatible with Mac OS X/macOS, Windows, Linux and DOS systems. So, if users anticipate using the flash drive with more than one operating system, they will definitely benefit from the FAT32 file system. For Apple Mac users, there are two ways to format a USB flash drive to FAT32, including Disk Utility and Terminal command line. Refer to detailed steps of using both tools for FAT32 format.
Method 1. Format FAT32 on Mac [Disk Utility]
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To format USB to FAT32 with Disk Utility will erase all data on the flash drive, so before you doing so, please do remember to check whether you have saved useful data to another secure device in advance.
To format the USB drive to FAT32, follow the next steps:
Step 1. Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac computer.
Step 2.Go to Applications > Utilities > Double click and open Disk Utility.
Step 3. Select your USB flash drive on the sidebar, choose Erase.
Step 4. Rename the USB flash drive, choose the format as MS-DOS (FAT) for Format, Master Boot Record for Scheme. Then click Erase.
Wait for the process to complete, then you’ll get an empty new USB flash drive with FAT32 as the file system. You can reuse it for saving data again.
Method 2. Format FAT32 on Mac [Terminal Command Line]
The command line behavior does the same way to erase data with the Disk Utility. Again, create a backup before taking this action.
To format FAT32 with Terminal, follow the next steps:
Step 1. Connect your USB flash drive to your Mac computer.
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Step 2. Hit cmd + space to run Spotlight, type: terminal and hit Enter.
3. Type:diskutil list and find out which disk is your USB drive. (In the below picture, you can see that /dev/disk2 is the USB drive)
4. Type: sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 MBRFormat /dev/disk2.
- sudo gives you user right.
- Diskutil calls disk utility program.
- eraseDisk commands to format.
- FAT32 sets the file system.
- MBRFormat tells disk utility to format with a Master Boot Record.
- /dev/disk2 is the location of the USB drive.
Wait for the process to complete. After this, you can type: diskutil list in command again to check if the formatting has been successful.
Complementary Data Recovery Tip
Formatting would erase data completely, make sure that you have a data backup. Otherwise, you can only use data recovery software to recover data from a formatted USB drive.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard has both Windows and Mac versions, so it's the optimal choice for data recovery, no matter you're using a PC or Mac. If you're a Mac user, for example, it takes only a few clicks for the software to scan and display your formatted data. To guarantee an effective data recovery without spending money to no avail, you can install the Mac data recovery free version for the first trial. You can preview all the found data before the final recovery.
To recover data from a formatted FAT32 USB flash drive on Mac, follow the next steps:
Step 1. Correctly connect your USB flash drive to your Mac. Launch EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard for Mac. Start selecting the flash drive and click Scan to let the software search lost files on it.
Step 2. After quick scan and deep scan, all files will be presented in the left pane in the scan results.
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Step 3. Select files you want to recover and click Recover Now button. Don't save the recoverable files to the USB drive itself in case of data overwriting.