In fact, you use it mainly by typing in commands. Terminal is another powerful native Mac tool, but it’s a lot less visual than Disk Utility. Choose a name, select MS-DOS (FAT) for the format, then Master Boot Record for the scheme. Select your USB drive on the left sidebar, then click the “Erase” button near the top of the window. On the Disk Utility window, click the “View” button and click “Show All Devices.” Open Disk Utility by opening Finder > Applications > Utilities, and double-clicking Disk Utility. Make sure your USB drive is securely connected to your Mac. Let’s try using Disk Utility for format a flash drive to FAT32 on Mac:

Here’s how to format a USB drive to FAT32 on Mac: Disk Utilityĭisk Utility is a powerful and easy-to-use disk management tool that lets you format, partition, repair, and mount/unmount storage devices. For both apps, the entire process only takes 5 steps. Disk Utility has a user-friendly GUI (graphical user interface), while Terminal is a spartan command line system. Below, we’ll cover Disk Utility and Apple Terminal. Fortunately, Mac provides intuitive (and free) tools built right into the operating system. If this is your first time formatting a storage device, it might sound a bit intimidating. Unfortunately, formatting a USB on Mac (and any other device) wipes all the files and folders from that drive – but using data recovery software, you can simply restore them. Or maybe your drive was corrupted and you want to clean it by formatting it (and you chose FAT32 for its compatibility).

In some cases, a device may ask you to format your USB drive to FAT32 in order to make it compatible.

It works with both older and modern computers, as well as other devices like consoles.įAT32 can mostly be found in portable storage devices such as: What makes it so popular as a file system is that it is the most cross-platform compatible among all file systems. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 GB, and can support a partition size of up to 32 TB. A file system is a method that the disk will use to organize data.

How to format an external hard drive to FAT32 on Mac?įAT32 (File Allocation Table32) is a file system.

How to Recover Data Lost From a Flash Drive During Formatting.

Macos format usb