How to Format USB Flash Drive to FAT32 on Mac Easily

Sue Wayne

Dec 21, 2020 • Filed to: Solve Mac Problems • Proven solutions

If your USB flash drive is not recognized by your Apple Mac computer because it has a different format it is kind of difficult to format it. You may not know how to format your USB flash drive to make it compatible with your Mac system but we do and will show you how to do it in this article.

Overview of Formatting USB Drive on Mac

Mac Systems have a different OS to Windows and this is where most of the problems like. Most USB flash drives on sale are designed to work with Windows operating systems that run on Fat32. Mac devices on the other hand run on either Mac OS Extended or APFS. If your drive is an APFS format or a Mac OS format you can format your drive easily but if it is a FAT32 format this may be a problem. If you have made the mistake of buying a flash drive they run on a FAT32 file format you don't have to discard it altogether. There are ways to format a flash drive that runs in a different format and we will show you steps to take to remedy the situation.

Related: Further, read and know more complete details on formatting external hard drive for Mac.

- 3 minutes to read it.

Step to Format a USB Drive to FAT32 on Your Mac

Plug the drive into the Mac system
Choose Applications- Utilities then Disk Utility

mac disk utility

From the sidebar pick USB drive
From the toolbar select Erase
Name the formatted disk and choose either ExFat or MS-DOS(FAT32) from the menu

format usb

Select erase to format your drive depending on the selection you have picked (FAT32 or ExFAT)

format drive

Convert/Format USB Flash drive to FAT32 using Command Line

Connect Flash drive to Mac
Tap CMD and space bar to open Spotlight. Type "terminal" and press Enter

format mac usb

Type in :diskutill land locate your USB drive
Type in sudo.diskutilerasediskFAT32MBRFormat/Dev/disk2
Sudo will give you the user right
Diskutill will call in the utility program
Erasedisk commands will format
FAT32 will set the file system
MBRFormat will tell the disk to format with Master Boot
/Dev/disk2 will be the USB drive location

format Mac flash drive

You will have to wait a while for the format to be completed. Type in : diskutill to check if the process was successful.

If you follow these steps religiously you should be able to resolve the issue quickly. If you're searching for a way that helps you recover formatted USB drive on Mac, download Recoverit Data Recovery software and go to the page telling you how to restore the formatted hard drive.

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