If you need to switch your drive to a different filesystem, follow the instructions on our guide Changing the USB Filesystem.
While NTFS is almost always the filesystem uses for local drives (notably the main C:\ drive for the Windows installation), USB disks and external hard drives can be formatted in FAT32, NTFS, or even exFat. The two primary filesystems in use in the Windows world are FAT32 and NTFS. There are a number of different formats that can be used, depending on the purpose and platform – for example, Windows PCs use one format while Macs and iPhones use another. While when you browse the contents of a disk, CD, or USB, you see files and folders, that information must be encoded into a sequence of zeros and ones in order to be stored on a physical disk. FAT 32 can be used on both Windows and MAC.I am formatting a new 1 TB Weste.
This guide will show you how to identify the current filesystem used by your device. In this video I go over how to format an external hard drive to FAT 32 on a MAC.
Note: You are supposed to have a partition created on the disk, before you format it.Many guides for creating a bootable USB, such as those used to run PC recovery software or to update the system BIOS or install Windows require that the USB stick to be used is first formatted as FAT32. WARNING: Be really careful before formating a disk, you will not be able to recover your data, double check that you are applying the command to the right device before you hit ENTER Now lets format it with: mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/sdc1 Units = cylinders of 5544 * 512 = 2838528 bytesĪs you can see /dev/sdc is where my usb thumb drive was connected. Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes You will see something like this: Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytesĢ55 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders Now that you have the right tools installed, it is time to use it, so to format a usb drive using FAT32 first insert your usb drive in the usb slot of your computer, and check with fdisk -l Install dosfstools in Slackware slackpkg install dosfstools Step 3 After that, type 'list disk'>' hit Enter'. Step 2 Next, type 'diskpart'>' hit Enter.
Once finding it, right-click it and choose 'Run as administrator' option. Step 1 In the Windows Search, look for the Command Prompt. Install dosfstools in Arch Linux pacman -Sy dosfstools If you are good at working with commands, then you can try to format your hard drive to FAT32 using the command prompt. Install dosfstools in Debian / Ubuntu apt-get install dosfstools The package you need to install in your Linux PC to be able to format disk using FAT32 file system is: dosfstools
What you need is to format the usb drive using FAT32 file system. How to format a usb drive with FAT32 file system on Linuxįor all Linux users, work with usb drives, is really easy, and share data with Windows users through it, is also easy.Īt least before you need to format the usb drive for any reason, if you format it using Linux ext3 or any other Linux mode, you will not be able (at least not easily) to share data with Windows users.