Format USB Drive to FAT32 on MAC OSX

BACKUP YOUR FILES BEFORE PERFORMING THESE STEPS

This Lee Sapara with a 30 second short video on Formatting a USB Drive
to Fat-32 on your mac.

In Disk Utility - select the drive name you want to format
Click Partition
Select the number of partitions you want to make
Under Format select MS-DOS (FAT)
Click the Apply
Click Partition
Wait for it to format
You can the close Disk Utility your drives icon will be on your desktop

Fat32 allows you to use the drive on both mac and windows allowing you to add and remove files in either operating system (pretty much universally) but any one file can not be larger than 4GB and the drive partition can be no larger than 32GB.

This video is dedicated to the best sister a little brother could ask for, Kim! Who recently bought a USB Drive for her computer and wants to be able to use the drive on both her iMac and her HP Laptop and make changes to those files on either computer using her new drive.

Check out more videos and howto's on my website http://lee.sasktech.net

Category:

Education

Tags:

• How
• to
• Format
• USB
• Drive
• FAT32
• on
• MAC
• OSX

[DaheeHeineken]

jesus, ur voice is soooo sweet :) thanks anyway!

[leesapara]

@DaheeHeineken Thanks gorgeous, U made my day! :)

[GordoGato]

Hey thanks for posting this, but when I tried, I wasn't even given the option of FAT when I tried to partition. Any thoughts?

[leesapara]

@GordoGato That's weird... I wounder if you tried as another format first like Mac journaled then close disk utility and try again to see if the FAT option appears

[GordoGato]

@leesapara hey thanks for responding. ill try that. Do you think it might have anything to do with how old the external hard drive is? It's about 5 years old :X

[leesapara]

@GordoGato no problem! No, I don't think it would be the age of the drive. Most drives dont care what you format them as no matter the age or size. If its corrupt maybe you might have problems - but then you would probably get an error no matter what format you put it in.

[LEON951]

THAAAAAAAAANNNNKKKK'ssssssssss­ssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You just saved the day

[o0shiba0o]

I don't see a partition tab :(

[GreenMeep]

FAT IS FAT32.

@MrCrazyKool Generally in your Utilities folder.

[MrCrazyKool]

Well where the hell is disk utility

[kbo206]

To those saying this is FAT16 and not FAT32, I can confirm that on OS X Lion it will produce a FAT32 partition. I used the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition map scheme.

[porqueyodije]

YOU ARE A SCHOLAR AND A GENTLEMAN! thanks so much for posting this! I got a GREAT DEAL on my seagate which was only PC formated! Ur the man! :)

[lauralicruelty]

Thank you!!! This helped me so much =]

[imthegreatest12345]

i want ntfs for my mac because it won't copy a file i want on the usb

[MissWooHoo1]

this is fat not fat32.