One of the most useful devices of the computer age is the pen, or flash, drive. With the ability to hold a surprisingly large amount of data for its size, flash drives save time by allowing users to quickly transfer data between computers. Previously, the two computers had to be networked, or users had to revert to clunky methods, such as attaching a hard drive to the computer or burning the files onto a CD. While flash drives are universal, some Mac computers are unable to read flash drives that have been formatted in a particular way, so learning how to properly format your pen drive is paramount.
Select the drive in the left pane. In the Name field, type a name for the pen drive. Select the 'Erase' tab in Disk Utility, making sure the flash drive is selected. Choose the desired format that you want the pen drive to have.
If you use your USB Flash Drive only on a Mac you will want to reformat it to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended (Journal)) which allows larger file sizes. In your Applications folder there is a folder called 'Utilities'. Here you will find an App called 'Disk Utility'. Open it and you will see something like this: To reformat your USB, select it and then click the Erase Tab. Here you can set the USB name and the file format (Mac OS Extended (Journal)). Sep 4, 2018 - This article would show you steps about how to format a USB drive on mac and how to recover formatted files from a USB drive.
If you’re planning to use it with both a Mac and a PC, select 'MS-DOS (Fat),' which will allow it to be read by both Windows and Macintosh computers. If you’re planning only to use it for Macs, select 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled).'
Click on the 'Erase' button. This will erase all the data on the pen drive, so back up any data you want to save before getting to this point. Eject the pen drive, either by dragging it into the trash or by using the eject button - the triangle icon - in the Finder window.
Assuming Vista or 7 (this should work on XP, 8, 8.1, and 10, as well) and that the disk is not showing up under My Computer at all:. Connect your disk. Run cmd as an Administrator. Run diskpart.exe. If you need help in this program. list disk.
Find the disk that corresponds to your USB disk. Select disk n where n is the number of the disk. Confirm that you're using the right disk with detail disk.
clean (Warning: This command erases the disk's partition information. Any data on the disk will no longer be accessible.). create partition primary. No size is needed if you want to use the whole disk. active. Marks the partition as potentially bootable.
format fs=fat32 quick. You can choose NTFS or exFAT instead of FAT32 if you want. (Note: Windows 10 limits FAT32 to 4GB. I recommend using exFAT instead, which is essentially a newer version of the same format.). assign. Assigns the disk a drive letter.
exit to quit. If you're still having problems with the disk after trying this, you might try omitting the quick from step 9 to do a full format. That will take a very long time and usually isn't necessary, but may help uncover physical damage to the disk.
In some cases you might need to re-initialize the disk. As above, this will destroy the data on the disk (or, rather, your ability to access it). To do that from diskpart.exe:. list disk. select disk n.
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attributes disk clear readonly. This command will unset the read-only flag on the disk.
You can see the current attributes with attributes disk or detail disk. online disk. Sets the device status to online if it's been disabled.
convert mbr. Converts the disk to MBR format, which will work just fine for most disks. If you've got a USB disk larger than 2 terabytes, however, you'll want to use convert gpt instead. I'm not sure if the above commands are all identical on older OSs (XP).