You can reformat a drive by choosing the drive – note that the one above is in the “External” category, do NOT choose an Internal drive! – then clicking on the “Erase” button off the very top set of icons. And make doubly sure you’ve chosen the correct drive in Disk Utility too: Pick the wrong one and oh, it can be catastrophic! Make sure you don’t need any of the data. Warning: Reformatting will irretrievably delete every single thing on the drive.
You can see here that the drive – a Kingston DT Elite 3.0 – has a 32GB capacity (it shows 31.44 because there’s always a little bit of space taken up by the file system structure itself) and while it’s called “Windows 8”, it’s actually in Mac format (as Get Info showed). Click to choose your drive and it’ll look something like this: Make sure there’s nothing on the flash drive you want to keep and launch “Disk Utility” from the Applications > Utilities folder.
#Format flash drive for mac and windows 10 pro#
Pretty common, but completely incomprehensible to a Windows system, whether it’s a swanky Surface Pro or an old clunker tower PC.
#Format flash drive for mac and windows 10 mac os#
I’ve highlighted the info on this particular drive: Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Let’s check it out!įirst off, plug in your flash drive and use Get Info to see what kind of file format it has: There’s another variation on the theme, ExFAT, that offers massive, thousands of terabytes, max file size.įortunately, the Mac Disk Utility program supports ExFAT along with FAT32 so you’re going to be in great shape. Still not that huge for modern systems and I have video files I share with clients that are considerably larger than FAT32 max file size. So almost all FAT file systems are really FAT32, which bumps the max file size up to 4GB. Problem is, FAT has a hard limit on file sizes because of how it was designed: If you have a file bigger than 32MB you’re out of luck. The most common is “FAT” (which stands for File Allocation Table, not a judgment on the user’s weight!). Not only can the Mac work with PC drives, though, it can format any drive or storage device to be Windows native too.īut there are additional wrinkles and nuances because Windows computers work with a variety of file system formats too. In fact, when you plug that USB flash drive into your Mac system, it’s quite likely it’s formatted for Windows and you aren’t even aware that the OS is translating file formats invisibly. While Windows computers tend to turn a cold shoulder to the Mac community, Apple has always ensured that interoperability between Mac and Windows is a breeze.
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