I plugged in a 250GB USB hard drive into my MacBook Pro and want to format it in FAT so I can transfer files back and forth between a windows machine.
(My windows7 machine only formats in exFAT which my Snow Leopard 2.6.4 doesn't support until I do the update).
So I want to format it on the mac.
but when I right click on the drive, it gives me the options to eject, copy, but not to format.
I can go into Disk Utilities, click on Partition, but the only option is the "Mac Journaled format".
How can I Format my USB drive as FAT from my MacBook Pro?
Best Answer
In Disk Utility select the drive that you want to partition, then the Partitions tab.
To make FAT and ExFAT available in FORMAT you need to change Volume Scheme from Current to 1 Partition.
You might also want to check under Options... that the partition scheme is Master Boot Record. I've happily formatted a USB to FAT32 using the Apple Partition Map (a hangover from creating an Ubuntu Live USB). My Mac would happily read the resulting FAT32 volumes but Windows of any flavour refused to read it.