Compatibility is a major concern when people have to shift to macOS. If you think finding the right software is a problem you’re wrong. In a few days or weeks, you can get all the macOS alternative apps you need. The real problem comes when you need to deal with accessories. Let’s not talk about the advanced ones like the printers or scanners, but come to something basic – USB Drives. As you know, USB Drives are quite suitable when you need quick data transfer. Getting the best performance, though, requires you to erase and format a USB Drive on your Mac itself.
Let’s put everything in a practical sense now. You have recently purchased a computer that runs on macOS and you also got a USB Drive. Depending on the purpose of the pen drive, you need to make certain decisions during the formatting process. In this article, we have a quite-detailed guide on how to erase and format a USB Drive and keep it accessible on the devices you like. This guide will be suitable for both beginners as well as those who want to try some experiments with File System techniques on your Mac. Essentially speaking, we’ll help you format a USB drive in the right manner.
Before we start the tutorial, there are a few things to know!
Terminal command line in Mac can be used to format USB devices. This method can be used when you are unable to format the USB device through Disk Utility. As always, having a backup option will save you when plan A fails for some reason. Let us go through the exact steps in formatting your USB drive to FAT32 on Mac using the command line. Here is the guide: Step 1. Attach the USB to your Mac while launching 'Disk Utility'. Search your USB drive name over the left panel of 'Disk Utility' and tap it. Press 'Erase' tab and then against the 'Format' option tap on the contextual menu. Pick 'Mac OS Extended. Nov 05, 2018 I can't format USB sticks that my car audio system can read. The car audio system reads FAT32 file systems. Using Disk utility MS Dos FAT supposed to create FAT32 formatted USB-drives, but not in my case after upgrading to macOS Mojave.
Possible Reasons for Formatting USB Drive using Mac
Some of the common reasons why you may need to format a new/old USB Drive via macOS are as follows. Try to confirm the reason before we move ahead, because there may be some minute differences in the whole process.
If you can relate to the above-mentioned reasons, you can go ahead and format the USB Drive. For the first and third scenarios, you can simply go with traditional USB Formatting. You will need more insight if you’re formatting the drive for the sake of advanced compatibility.
How to Format USB in Mac – Let’s Go Step by Step
Note: For this article, we’re using a recently-bought SanDisk USB Drive of 16GB Capacity. It hasn’t been used before and I’d like to create a Mac-friendly USB Drive. So, the tutorial will be from that perspective. Shall we start?
Step #1
Connect the USB Drive to your Mac device, using the fastest port possible. Wait for a few seconds while your drive will be detected by the computer.
Step #2
We’re using an inbuilt Mac tool named Disk Utility to format USB Drives. In case if you don’t know, it’s quite a powerful tool for managing your disks, partitions and more. It’s one thing I liked about Mac when I shifted into Mac. Podcast for mac.
To open Disk Utility, you can simply search for it via Spotlight Search [ Press Cmd+Space and enter the query Disk Utility.] Alternatively, you can find it via Finder Menu à Go à Utilities and open Disk Utility from that list.
Step #3
Now, you’ll be able to see the Disk Utility interface of macOS.
On the sidebar of the interface, you can see two submenus – Internal and External. In my case, there is only one internal partition and you can see the USB Drive we’d connected earlier.
Step #4
To proceed further, you can select the USB Drive from External sub-menu.
In the upcoming page, there will be a toolbar on top position.
From the menu, choose the button named Erase.
Step #5
In a second, you can see a prompt window, asking for some details.
Step 5.1
First of all, you can rename the USB Drive if you want. Otherwise, the previous name would be retained. It’s completely one’s choice and doesn’t have much to do with the functioning of the drive.
Step 5.2
More importantly, you must select the appropriate Format of the drive. Here, you have four options, which offer different abilities. We’ll cover the technical aspects later, but a quick overview is necessary. The options you will find are:
Among these, we believe that ExFAT is the most appropriate File System for a USB drive. It offers complete support for Mac and other platforms. By the way, if you are planning to use the drive for backups — you will be having a big-enough USB Drive, we suppose —, you can go for Mac OS X Extended.
Step 5.3
Format Usb For Mac Bootable
Now, you need to select the partition scheme from the three available options — GUID Partition Map, MBR and APM.
You can choose either GUID Partition Map or MBR if you want Windows compatibility. APM is exclusive for Apple devices, and it can be a problem at times. So, make sure that you make the right choice.
There is also an option named Security Options. In that window, you can select the appropriate ratio of security and speed. It’s an optional feature. So, if you have provided the above-mentioned features, it’s the time to hit the Erase button.
Final Step
Yeah, that’s about it. You have, in a matter of a few minutes, have erased and formatted a USB Drive on your Mac. We hope that was easier than expected.
Wrapping Up – How to Format USB on Mac
We believe this is a comprehensive guide on how to erase and format USB drives on your Mac. We’ve tried to cover almost all the sections and to clear your possible doubts. The only decisions that you need to take are the File System and Partition Scheme. Itunes for mac. Except those two, everything goes like clockwork. Have any other doubts while formatting your USB drive? Do let us know through your comments.
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All external USB disks can be formatted to work on Mac OSX, but not always straight out of the box.
In this tutorial we look at formatting disks via the GUI app called Disk Utility and its equivalent command line tool diskutil. This will work in all modern versions of Apple Mac OSX including 10.9 Mavericks, 10.8, 10.7 and 10.6.
Initially external disks may be formatted for Windows and after you connect it to your Mac it appears in the device list in the Finder, but is a read only disk meaning that you can’t write to it in its current format.
Format Usb For Mac Install
The when the disk is selected in the finder bottom left symbol with the crossed out pencil means that the disk can only be read not written to. Why this is, is because they come formatted as Windows NTFS drive which OSX can only read, so we need to reformat them so we can read and write – thats where a handy utility called Disk Utility comes to the rescue.
Disk UtilityUsb Format Tool
Disk Utility is found in /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, open it and select your external disk in the list on the left.
There are 2 items (or more) for each disk, you have the actual disk and the volume of the disk, the example below has the Disk Named 2 TB WD Elements and the Volume is named Elements, this example uses the Volume which will in turn also format the Disk.
Brackets for mac. Then below you will see the Format type which will be NTFS or possibly MS-DOS (FAT), we need to reformat the volume and make the format Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
Reformatting the Disk
Still with the external disk selected in Disk Utility go to the Erase tab, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the format dropdown, choose to name the disk and then click Erase.
And there you have it one read and writable disk ready for OSX.
Format Usb For Macbook Boot
The Security Options option next to erase can control how the disk is erased by zeroing out all the blocks on the disk, this then make it impossible to salvage any previous data, with new disks this is not necessary.
Format Usb For Mac On Windows
Also the other format option Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) in the dropdown would allow you have same name files or folders in the same location with a mix of case like ‘red’ and ‘RED’, this is popular in the Linux disk format and also possible on OSX but not the default on OSX shipped disks.
Doing it on the line
You can also do this using the command line using the tool diskutil which is the command line interface to Disk Utility, launch Terminal, Applications/Utilities/Terminal – to see a list of your disks:
and the results are similar to:
This gives us a lot of information including the disk identifiers, size of disk and partitioning scheme. So in this example we will reformat the actual disk, disk2 using the command:
Here the command diskutil eraseDisk does the erasing, format is expressed as JHFS+ which is the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and disk is named BackupMaster and the actual target disk is defined by its identifier disk2. The Terminal will result in this output:
Format Usb For Macbook
And there you have it one formatted disk ready to go.
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