Disk Utility User Guide
Format Flash Drive Mac with Disk Utility Your Mac computer comes with a handy utility appropriately called Disk Utility, which can be used to format any storage device. Larry: Erasing will erase the drive and set it up using the format you selected. I suppose if they used “format” then some people would think it meant to reformat the drive and somehow maintain the data. Windows FAT32 USB Drive in Mac Click on the “Erase” button on “Disk Utility” and choose the format as either APFS or Mac OS Extended. In most cases, your Mac will show the supported format by default and you don’t need to change it. On older Mac, you will see an additional scheme option, choose “GUID Partition Map”.
How To Format A Usb Drive For Mac And Pc Compatibility
In Disk Utility on Mac, you can erase and reformat storage devices to use with your Mac. Erasing a storage device deletes everything on it.
If you have any files you want to save, copy them to another storage device.
Open the Disk Utility app on your Mac using one of the following methods, depending on the type of disk or volume you want to erase:
If you want to erase your startup disk: Start up from macOS Recovery, then choose Disk Utility from the Recovery window.
If you want to erase any other type of storage device: Double-click Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder.
Choose View > Show All Devices.
In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to erase, then click the Erase button .
Click the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map.
Click the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format.
Enter a name.
(Optional) If available, click Security Options, use the slider to choose how many times to write over the erased data, then click OK.
Secure erase options are available only for some types of storage devices. If the Security Options button is not available, Disk Utility cannot perform a secure erase on the storage device.
Click Erase, then click Done.
Once Disk Utility is open you'll see the list of available drives on the left. Choose the drive you'd like to format. NOTE that formatting your drive will erase the contents, so make sure you back. A new external hard drive or a USB flash drive that you just bought can be used with both Mac and PC, but not always straight out of the box because most of them (external hard drives or USB flash drive) are sold in NTFS format, which is fully compatible only with Windows.
Note: With a solid-state drive (SSD), secure erase options are not available in Disk Utility. For more security, consider turning on FileVault encryption when you start using your SSD drive.
How To Format Flash Drive For Mac
