How to reformat USB Flash/Pen drive in Mac OS X?
Formatting a Pen Drive in Mac
You might want to delete all files from your Pen Drive, you can just use the Select All function to delete everything. But when you use this method, you might not re-gain all of the space because it might contain locked or hidden files or due to other problems, all files will not be removed. There is a good solution to this, that is reformatting.
When you format your Pen drive, you remove everything that it contains. Once all data has been removed, usually you can not recover it. So, backup the important files that you do not want to lose. When you are satisfied your Pen drive does not contain anything important that you may need, follow these steps to reformat it:
- Open up the Disk Utility program located in the Applications/Utilities folder. You will find the Disk Utility program in there. Every Mac comes installed with this program.
2. When the Disk Utility program opens select the USB drive you wish to reformat from the left window. In the right hand-side window you can select some formatting options. Open the Erase pane on top, in the Volume Format, specify the type of format you want to perform on your Pen Drive. If you want to change the name of the Drive, enter it in the Name field. If you want to use your Drive on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux also then select FAT32. If your Drive capacity is less than 32GB, you will only see the FAT option, select this one. If you are going to use your USB Pen Drive only with Mac OS X, you might want to select Mac OS Extended Filesystem.
These are the easy steps to perform formatting on your USB Pen Drive. Just before you decide to reformat your Drive, make sure it does not contain any important data because once formatting is done, all data will be erased and recovery is usually impossible.
