How to format a flash drive on my mac book pro

Insert the drive. launch Disk Utility. Select the drive from the left side and then select Erase. Then select to format Fat 32 so it will mount on both your Mac and a PC.

If you're moving it between Mac and Windows, you want to format your flash drive with the FAT32 filesystem. It shouldn't matter whether you format it on your Mac or on a Windows machine.

To do it on the Mac, plug in the flash drive, and open Disk Utility (in your /Applications/Utilities folder). The drive should appear in the list on the left of the DU window.

Select the drive, then click the Erase tab. On that tab, select MS-DOS (FAT) as the volume format, choose a disk name if you want to, then click Erase, and wait.

That said, if your drive just "didn't work any more" after a while, it may be faulty and it's possible that re-formatting it won't help. (All flash drives do have a finite number of read/write cycles before they don't work reliably any more, too, although it's unlikely you've reached that limit through normal usage.)

Hmm, no FAT16 option on my Mac, only MS-DOS(FAT). Where exactly are you seeing that?

Most brand new flash drives are formatted FAT32 out of the box, so you quite possibly don't actually need to format it at all-- have you tried it?

Does the older flash drive work on a PC still, cec? If not it may simply be defective. Flash drives can live a hard life!

You shouldn't need to reformat your new stick. I very much doubt that the failure of the old one has anything at all to do with the fact that it wasn't formatted on a Mac .

What OS are you using, by the way? Your various posts seem to say different things.

Just by the way many smaller/older memory sticks will be formatted as FAT-16 rather than FAT-32. Disk Utility , from memory , will actually automatically do this if the drive is under a certain size.

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileAllocationTable#Future :
+FAT is still the normal file system for removable media (with the exception of CDs and DVDs), with FAT12 used on floppies, and FAT16 on most other removable media (such as flash memory cards for digital cameras and USB flash drives). Most removable media are not yet large enough to benefit from FAT32, although some larger flash drives, like SDHC, do make use of it. FAT16 is used on these drives for reasons of compatibility and size overhead.+

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen