Nov 15, 2018 - Want to use one drive between a Mac and Windows PC? For now at least, you'll want to format the MacOS partition as MacOS Extended (Journaled). If you would like to specify a partition style, or scheme, select Options.
Formatting is the term used in operating system to erase all content in the drive and make it to initial state. You can format both internal and external drives in Windows 10. USB devices are prone to damage and file corruptions due to usage on multiple computers. So, there are many situations you would like to erase all the content on your USB and format it like a new one. Windows supports file systems like NTFS and FAT for formatting drives.
Unfortunately you can’t use the Windows formatted USBs on your Mac for saving content. Though you can mount the drive to view and copy the content, you can’t write on the drive. In order to write on the USB drive on Mac, you need to format the device into Apple supported file systems like APFS or Mac OS Extended. Similar to Windows 10, you can format USB drives on Mac using Disk Utility app. Formatting USB in Windows 10 First off, ensure your flash drive is already plugged in to your PC. To verify that your system recognizes your flash drive, press “Windows + E” and open “File Explorer”. On the left pane, click on “This PC”.
You will see a screen like the one shown below. Under “Devices and drives”, locate your Flash drive. Format Complete Points to Remember. It is necessary to format the USB before creating a bootable flash drive from ISO file. Formatting may fail if there are physical damages on the drive. Sometimes formatting reduces the size of the drive by ignoring the corrupted segments.
Similar to USB, you can format any of the individual partition on the hard drive like C:, D:, etc. Formatting USB Drive on Mac Insert the USB drive on your Mac and follow the below instructions to format. Press “Command + Spacebar” to open Spotlight Search box and type “disk utility”. Open the “Disk Utility” app from the search results. Disk Utility will show the current file system of the USB drive. In the below screenshot, it shows as MS-DOS (FAT 32) which is a Windows based file system.
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.).
![Windows Windows](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125448118/981438384.png)
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. 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).