No fat32 format option on BigSur disk Utility

9w2gsy wrote:

Hi Good Day,

I am trying to format my External HD using DiskUtility but there is no FAT 32 option to choose. Anybody can help? I'am runing on OS BigSur.

Within Disk Utility click on "View" and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. Select the physical drive and erase it as GUID partition and exFAT since FAT32 has drive/partition size limitations and may not work on a 2TB drive (2TB is the maximum size, but some drives may be slightly larger and cause problems). Also exFAT allows for larger files than FAT32 so exFAT is the better option.

I also see that Disk Utility is showing two identical looking volumes for your external drive and that may cause a problem with Disk Utility (it is nothing you've done wrong). I've personally seen Disk Utility showing multiple items (volumes/Containers) when just a single APFS Container is on a drive and Disk Utility is unable to deal with it even when trying to erase the physical drive. If this happens, then you may need to use the command line to write zeroes to the beginning of the drive to destroy the partition table so that Disk Utility can then properly erase the drive. I can provide instructions if necessary if my earlier suggestion to erase the whole physical drive as exFAT does not work.

brbo wrote:

Hi 9w2gsy,

Apple has a support article about 32bit app compatibility:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208436

Hope this helps.

FYI, this isn't about 32 bit apps. It is about formatting a USB drive with FAT32 file system.

Hi 9w2gsy,

Apple has a support article about 32bit app compatibility:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208436

Hope this helps.

Ok. Thank you.