7/20/15 8:49 am MacMost Formatting USB Flash Drives For Mac When you buy a USB Flash Drive, also called a Jump Drive, Thumb Drive, USB Stick or one of many other names, it usually comes formatted for Windows computers. If you plan to use the drive only for your Mac, then you can easily reformat it in Mac OS Extended format using Disk Utility. Flash Drives also sometimes come with specialized Windows software that Mac users don't need. Formatting cleans off these files to get it ready for you to use. Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode let's look at how to format a brand new USB thumb drive. So say you have just purchased a new USB flash drive. You got it in a store or ordered it online and you want to start using it with your Mac. Now the problem is that most of these drives you are going to get are going to be already formatted but for Windows.
When formatting a USB Flash Drive (or any drive for that matter) OS X offers the following 7 choices Mac OS Extended format is a hard disk format that increases the number of allocation blocks on the disk and also allows more than 65,000 files on the hard disk.
This will be great if you actually want to use it to go between Mac and Windows. You can keep it formatted Windows, access the files on your Mac and on Windows as well. But if you only use Mac, like I do, then you want to reformat it to use just for Mac. So, I'm going to show you what happens when you first plug in one of these USB drives and then how to get it reformatted so it's ready for your Mac. I've just got a plain Finder window open here. It's pointed to my Documents folder but that doesn't really matter. On the left side I can see on the sidebar Favorites and Devices.
I have two external drives hooked up and now when I plug in the USB flash drive I'm going to see that appear here as well. You can see there it appears. It is called No Name. So this is right from the factory. I just took it out of the packaging and I can now select it and see what's on it. Now, what's on it is, you can see right here, a dot exe file.
This tells me right away that this is a Windows formatted drive and everything that they have included here is meant for use in Windows. So it's got some software and things like that.
![Put cd on flash drive for car Put cd on flash drive for car](http://doughaslam.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/fat32image.jpg)
Special offers that they've got. But I don't need any of that. I just want to use this for plain, regular storage. Actually on this one, if I click on it here, I can see that there is information about how to download their software for Mac. But I don't want to use any of that. This is just going to be a flash drive that I'm going to use to temporarily store things. I just want it formatted normally.
So in order to do that I'm going to run Disk Utility. I'm going to bring up the Spotlight menu with Command Space, search for Disk Utility and run it.
Now I'll see it appear, as well as my other drives, on the left. I can select it. I can select the volume that is on it called No Name or the top level. I want to select the top level of the drive there. I can see some things about it here at the bottom like the size of it and things like that. I can also select the volume itself and see, indeed, it is formatted as MS-DOS.
So I want to completely reformat it. How I'm going to do that is to select the drive at this level. I'm going to select Erase and I'm going to change the format here and select the Mac OS Extended, which is what I want and I'm going to give it a real name. I'll call it My Flash Drive or sometimes like if I'm going to be traveling with these I like to put my name or phone number or something there that can give somebody information that, you know, if it gets mixed up with somebody else's drive or something like that we can quickly figure out which one is there. I'm just going to call this one Files, or something like that, and then I'm going to click Erase. Then it's going to ask me to confirm. I'm going to say yes.
Then I'm going to select Erase. You can see it's going to go pretty fast. Now it is reformatted. Now select it again and it is ready to reformat as another title. But I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to, instead, quit Disk Utility and I can see here it is now on the left and it is there and it is ready. Those files that the manufacturer put on it are gone. It is Mac formatted now and ready for use. This, of course, also works with any type of external drive. Not just the little flash drives. If you've bought a regular external drive to use for storing some files or archiving some things, creating clones or backups or anything like that.
You can use that same technique to reformat it from the Windows format that it probably shipped with to the Mac OS Extended format.