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Full stepsĮxFAT - Best Format for USB/External Hard Drive on Windows and MacĮxFAT, known as a newer version of FAT32, is short for Extensible File Allocation Table, introduced by Microsoft in 2006. Full stepsĬonnect your external hard drive or USB > Press Command + Space keys, type Disk Utility. I'm not sure if the above commands are all identical on older OSs (XP).To format USB or external hard drives, there are 4 major USB formatters that you can have a try. If you've got a USB disk larger than 2 terabytes, however, you'll want to use convert gpt instead. Converts the disk to MBR format, which will work just fine for most disks. Sets the device status to online if it's been disabled. You can see the current attributes with attributes disk or detail disk. This command will unset the read-only flag on the disk. As above, this will destroy the data on the disk (or, rather, your ability to access it). In some cases you might need to re-initialize the disk. That will take a very long time and usually isn't necessary, but may help uncover physical damage to the disk. If you're still having problems with the disk after trying this, you might try omitting the quick from step 9 to do a full format. I recommend using exFAT instead, which is essentially a newer version of the same format.) You can choose NTFS or exFAT instead of FAT32 if you want.

Marks the partition as potentially bootable. No size is needed if you want to use the whole disk Any data on the disk will no longer be accessible.) clean (Warning: This command erases the disk's partition information.Confirm that you're using the right disk with detail disk. select disk n where n is the number of the disk. Find the disk that corresponds to your USB disk.

Assuming Vista or 7 (this should work on XP, 8, 8.1, and 10, as well) and that the disk is not showing up under My Computer at all:
