This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Robin. In the sidebar, select the disk you want to format to use with Windows computers. Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.įrom the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.Ĭlick Erase and follow prompts to confirm. In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View > Show All Devices. Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). While first ensuring you have a copy of any data on a drive you want to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, follow these steps: Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB. If you’re both Mac users, swell with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.īut FAT32 is distinctly out of date. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else.
For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory.
