

- #Format thumb drive for mac boot how to
- #Format thumb drive for mac boot mac os
- #Format thumb drive for mac boot Pc
#Format thumb drive for mac boot Pc

#Format thumb drive for mac boot mac os
You can use that same technique to reformat it from the Windows format that it probably shipped with to the Mac OS Extended format. 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. This, of course, also works with any type of external drive. It is Mac formatted now and ready for use. Those files that the manufacturer put on it are gone.

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. Now select it again and it is ready to reformat as another title. You can see it's going to go pretty fast. I'm just going to call this one Files, or something like that, and then I'm going to click Erase. 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 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. How I'm going to do that is to select the drive at this level. I can also select the volume itself and see, indeed, it is formatted as MS-DOS. I can see some things about it here at the bottom like the size of it and things like that. I want to select the top level of the drive there. I can select the volume that is on it called No Name or the top level. Now I'll see it appear, as well as my other drives, on the left. I'm going to bring up the Spotlight menu with Command Space, search for Disk Utility and run it. So in order to do that I'm going to run Disk Utility. This is just going to be a flash drive that I'm going to use to temporarily store things.
#Format thumb drive for mac boot how to
I just want to use this for plain, regular storage.Īctually on this one, if I click on it here, I can see that there is information about how to download their software for Mac. So it's got some software and things like that. 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. Now, what's on it is, you can see right here, a dot exe file. I just took it out of the packaging and I can now select it and see what's on it. 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. On the left side I can see on the sidebar Favorites and Devices. It's pointed to my Documents folder but that doesn't really matter. I've just got a plain Finder window open here. 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. You can keep it formatted Windows, access the files on your Mac and on Windows as well.īut if you only use Mac, like I do, then you want to reformat it to use just for Mac. This will be great if you actually want to use it to go between Mac and Windows. Now the problem is that most of these drives you are going to get are going to be already formatted but for Windows. You got it in a store or ordered it online and you want to start using it with your Mac. So say you have just purchased a new USB flash drive.

On today's episode let's look at how to format a brand new USB thumb drive. Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with. Check out Formatting USB Flash Drives For Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
