Mac thinks USB is the wrong format

disk-utilityfat32partitionusb

I have a USB drive that I cleaned and formatted as FAT32 on my Linux machine because Diskutil disableOwnership wouldn't work. I plugged it into the Windows machine with the files I need and copied them onto the USB with no problems. But when I plugged the USB into my Mac, it gave the error, "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

I reopened terminal and ran diskutil info. Here's the output for the particular disk:

/dev/disk2 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     Apple_partition_scheme                        *30.8 GB    disk2
   1:        Apple_partition_map                         4.1 KB     disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS                         2.4 MB     disk2s2

Windows and Linux are both recognizing the disk correctly as a FAT32, but MacOS thinks it is an Apple Partition scheme. What is a possible cause? Is there a way to force MacOS to recognize the disk correctly?

Note: The reason I formatted the disk with Linux was that I get the error "Couldn't modify the partition map" when I use Diskutil to erase the disk.

Best Answer

This question has a comment that FAT32 is not best for Mac. Can you format disc as ExFAT? That would be best if you want this to be cross-platform or HFS+ for Mac only. Reformatting a drive will delete all data on the drive.

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