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Partition USB drive

I am using Disk Utility to partition a USB 2.1TB drive, have selected view all devices and the partition button is grayed out. How do I partition this USB?

iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021, 2 ports)

Posted on Sep 29, 2022 8:27 AM

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14 replies

Sep 29, 2022 10:35 AM in response to mmgi23

My recollection of doing this myself is that first you have to erase the device (the device, not the drive). When you do that, you will select a format & partition scheme. You should select GUID partition scheme. If it's an SSD, select APFS as the format; if it's an HDD select MacOS Extended Journaled.


Once that's done, you should be able to add more partitions to the drive. But, why do you want to partition the drive in the first place?

Sep 30, 2022 6:02 AM in response to mmgi23

I have tried to do this before, and had problems starting with an MS-DOS partition.

I think you will need to erase the drive in either Mac OS Extended (GUID partition Map) or APFS.

Then, Partition that. You can change the first partition to MS-DOS (FAT32) and leave the remainder what you want. Since you want to use this with some sort of camera device, I would imagine the MS-DOS partition has to be in the beginning.

But, I don't know that your device will be able to handle the partitioned drive.

Sep 30, 2022 10:20 AM in response to mmgi23

How about creating a sparsebundle or .dmg image formatted at FAT32. Once the image is open/mounted, it will appear as another accessible volume. I really don't recommend using multiple partitions because it is so hard to make changes when you find out later that one or all of the partitions don't have enough room.

Partition USB drive

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