External drives and thumb drives

robert_coady wrote:

I have an external drive that I inadvertnally deleted all volumes, now the disk is no longer recognised by finder or disk utilities.

Most likely, you deleted not just this drive's volumes, but its partition as well. Regardless, this drive should still appear in the Disk Utility (DU).

With the drive attached, open the DU. At the top of the DU, select View, and change it to: Show All Devices. This drive should appear under the External category on the left-side of the DU. If it does, select it, and then, select Partition from the DU's menu bar. From there you can recreate the APFS partition/container.

Also I have a usb thumb drive preformatted with ms dos Fat 32, format. How can i. create volumes if AFPS format is not one of the options

This thumb drive should also appear in the DU under the External category. Select it, and this time, select Erase from the DU's menu bar. If you are still not seeing an option for APFS, then select Partition from the DU's menu bar.

Ref:

• Partition a physical disk in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support
• Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac - Apple Support (CA)