Please help diskutil partitionDisk for Fat doesn't work syntax nowhere to be found.

Question

Please help diskutil partitionDisk for Fat doesn't work syntax nowhere to be found.

I am trying to format a flash drive with fat32, this is beyond frustrating, no syntax examples anywhere and all articles online just have the man page.

i run this; diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 MBR JHFS+ untitled 0b

then I try to change it as FAT32 and continually get a syntax fail.

PLEASE SOMEONE SHOW ME HOW TO DO diskutil partitionDisk MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT32"

what the **** is going on I want 1 partition filling the entire disk, mbr, fat32, why so **** difficult?

please save me before I hit myself.

OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 8, 2015 4:00 AM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,276 points

Sep 8, 2015 4:42 AM in response to applesoobdood

applesoobdood wrote:

I am trying to format a flash drive with fat32, this is beyond frustrating, no syntax examples anywhere and all articles online just have the man page.

Here's the important part you seem to be missing:

For each partition, a triplet of the desired file system format, vol-

ume name, and size must be specified. … The triplets must be as follows:

o Format names are of the form jhfs+, HFS+, MS-DOS, etc.; a

list of formattable file systems (more precisely, specific

file system personalities exported by the installed file

system bundles) and common aliases is available from the

listFilesystems verb.

Following the instructions, this works:

diskutil partitionDisk disk8 MBR fat32 "NO NAME" 100%

Note that in your example, you didn't complete the triplet, i.e. volume name and the size. You can use a percentage as the size as I did above.

diskutil partitionDisk disk8 MBR "MS-DOS FAT32" "NO NAME" 100%

Also, the quotes are only necessary if you have spaces in the format or name

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