To do this, you need a trusted data recovery tool. Well, you don’t have to fret if you experience this as you can recover your lost data from formatted USB on Mac. When this happens, you lose all data saved on the USB prior to formatting. It’s possible to forget to backup your data before your format your USB. Method #3: How to Recover Lost Data after Formatting USB You can start using your USB with the FAT32 file system to save data. When this process is completed, type in 'diskutil list' in the command again to review the status of the USB drive and to see if it has been successfully formatted.

'MBRFormat' commands the disk utility to commence formatting with Master Boot Record.

'eraseDisk' gives the command to format the drive.

'Diskutil' locates the disk utility program.

Method #1: How to Format USB to FAT32 on Mac with Disk Utilityįollow the steps highlighted below to format a USB drive to FAT32 on Mac: Let’s look at the step-by-step guide to format USB to FAT32 on Mac. Please note that it is recommended that you back up your USB drive first before you format it to avoid losing important data.

If you plan to use the drive to store different file formats, especially video files, formatting the USB to FAT32 is actually necessary. Since many USB drives can’t be used on Mac PC directly, formatting it to FAT32 makes it usable whether you want to use it on Mac or Windows. Formatting your USB to FAT32 is the most appropriate thing to do because it can be written and read on both Mac and Windows operating systems. There are a number of reasons why you need to format USB to FAT32 on a Mac. We’ll look at all these in detail in this article. There are basically two ways to format USB to FAT32 on Mac Terminal Command and Disk Utility and in case you lose important data while formatting, it is possible to recover the data using a data recovery tool. Some USB drives can’t be used directly with a Mac system until you format them to be compatible with the macOS extended file system.

Updated to macOS Data Recovery Tips by William on | Approved by Coletta Teske Whitehead

Mac os how to format usb drive