Why OS X is limited to FAT16

I haven't had occasion to format any SD cards, but I have formatted flash drives and hard drives using OS X and they are all formatted FAT32.

Disk Utility tries to do what is "right". It will format smaller drives with FAT16 and larger ones with FAT32.

I think you have to use the command line to force a smaller drive to be FAT32.

Run "diskutil list" to see a list of your drives.
Then do "diskutil eraseVolume "MS-DOS FAT32" <volume name> /dev/disk<n>s<m>

Where <volume name> is the name you want to give it. <n> is the disk number. <m> is the partition number.

Disk Utility framework is capable of any msdos fat format, but unfortunately, the GUI version
doesn't give you many choices, and what it decides should be the right format can be wrong.

This, of course, leaves you little choice but to use the command line (Terminal.app) to do it, or
purchase a third party Disk Partitioning Utility, such as iPartition.

There is a third option, use windows to do it, if you have boot camp installed or a virtual machine
client (Parallels, Fusion, etc.).

The Terminal command format is as follows:
diskutil partitionDisk <device> 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT32" <volume_name> <partition_size>
where:
<device> = BSD name of source disk, example: /dev/disk4 or
volume mount point, example: /Volumes/SD

<volume_name> = whatever you want to call it!
If you use spaces, enclose the name in quotes.
example: SD or "My SD"

<partition_size> = floating point numbers followed by a
letter or percent sign
Examples: 1G (1 gigabyte), 1000K (1000 KILOBYTES), 5.5M (5.5 megabytes),
25.4% (25.4 percent of whole disk size).

example:
diskutil partitionDisk /Volumes/SD 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT32" "My SD" 100%

##
partitionDisk device [numberOfPartitions] [[APM]Format | [MBR]Format |
[GPT]Format] [part1Format part1Name part1Size part2Format
part2Name part2Size part3Format part3Name part3Size ...]

in terminal run command:
man diskutil

(for more info)

Um the trick is to format the card +with the camera+.

Regards

TD