A new external hard drive or a USB flash drive that you just bought can be used with both Mac and PC, but not always straight out of the box because most of them (external hard drives or USB flash drive) are sold in NTFS format, which is fully compatible only with Windows. Use Disk Utility to Format USB Flash Drive on Mac. Minitool partition wizard free download for windows 7 full version. The simplest way to format a disk in Mac OS is to simply use the Disk Utility since it is the Mac’s built in disk maintenance tool. To format USB drive on Mac using this method, all you need to do is plug in the USB device into your Mac and select it from the Disk Utility’s sidebar menu.
To do it on the Mac, plug in the flash drive, and open Disk Utility (in your /Applications/Utilities folder). The drive should appear in the list on the left of the DU window.
Select the drive, then click the Erase tab. On that tab, select MS-DOS (FAT) as the volume format, choose a disk name if you want to, then click Erase, and wait.
That said, if your drive just 'didn't work any more' after a while, it may be faulty and it's possible that re-formatting it won't help. (All flash drives do have a finite number of read/write cycles before they don't work reliably any more, too, although it's unlikely you've reached that limit through normal usage.)
Aug 23, 2008 1:22 PM
How do I download Mac OS X onto a flash drive on my PC?
Added (1). I have two used Mac Minis without an OS and no DVD player. I need to download a MAC OS onto my PC to a flash drive so I can install it on my Mac Minis. I don't want the MAC OS to try to auto install to my PC and create a huge problem. Tips?
The only official way is to download the Mac system on a Mac computer. Apple doesn't let you download Mac OS on a non-Apple computer. First, try to see if you can do an Internet recovery. This lets you download the Mac system over the Internet; you won't have to deal with the whole flash drive thing.
If the Internet recovery doesn't work, then take a look at this video: I've done something like this before and it works without much problem. However, as I mentioned, Apple doesn't let you download OS X on a non-Apple computer, so you will need to find it through unofficial means…
When your non OS macs boot up they usually have a way to get to the internet and download a new OS that is compatible with your machine.
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