El Captain Drive Formatter (FAT and exFat) does not Work with Windows

Question

El Captain Drive Formatter (FAT and exFat) does not Work with Windows

Since I've installed El Capitan, anytime I format a flash drive on my Macbook Air in FAT for exFat and try and use them on a Windows computer it always says that the drive is corrupt and that I have to format the drive. When I try and format it on the Windows computer, it only lets me format 200 mb of the drive, not the full capacity. I have tried this with multiple flash drives and gotten the same result every time. Whenever I put the flash drive back in my Macbook air, the flash drive works fine.

MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11), null

Posted on Oct 16, 2015 9:57 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

boophotography

Level 1

0 points

Oct 18, 2015 1:37 AM in response to soccerfinatic74

This is super embarrassing as I'm giving clients photos they've paid for and they're seeing empty usb's...

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Answer 2

bwinkler

Level 1

14 points

Nov 1, 2015 5:31 PM in response to soccerfinatic74

From: https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/3q26am/el_capitan_formatted_usb_drives_don t_work_on/

The Disk Utility advanced options of El Capitan are hidden and you needed, first:

Quit Disk Utility.
Open the Terminal utility.
Run the following Command:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options 1

Relaunch Disk Utility

And now, just format your USB with MBR Partition (Master boot record) and exFAT file System.

The USB now can mount in OSX & Windows.

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Answer 3

Feb 24, 2016 10:23 AM in response to soccerfinatic74

I ran into this very issue last week at the public library where I go to print files since I don't own a printer.

I used a different drive than usual that I'd formatted on my Mac as ExFAT, and got the same error message you described.

And when I tried to format it on the library's PC I got the same message about a 200 MB limit.

The regular computer guy wasn't there that day and there was someone I'd never seen before filling in and he was clueless about formatting.

Fortunately I'd brought the drive I normally use and had copied the necessary files onto it and was able to print them.

Today I'm trying to format the first drive at home so I can print files at the library later.

I was searching for which scheme to use when I found this discussion.

I had tried ExFAT with GUID last time, so maybe that was the problem.

I just formatted the drive with ExFat MBR, so hopefully it works later.

I don't remember having used the Terminal command bwinkler posted in the past, but MBR is available in the Scheme menu.

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