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Friday, May 16, 2014

Formatting A Flash Drive with an HFS+ Filesystem and Putting it Back to Fat32

Recently I tried to use a flash drive that I had used TransMac on in the past. Since TransMac had expired, I could not format the flash drive from within there. Luckily, Windows has Diskpart, a command prompt tool that makes getting my flash drive back to fat32 relatively painless. Here is how to do it. (Warning: Do at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damage you may cause):

Step 1: Go to run, type in cmd, and then, when Command Prompt opens,
type:diskpart

Step 2: We must now find the disk # corresponding to the flash drive. To do this,
type:list disk
There will be a number of disks that pop up, depending on how many hard drives you have. If your usb drive is plugged into the computer, one of the numbers will be your USB drive. It shouldn't be hard to identify since it is probably much smaller than the rest of the hard drives. Just really make sure it is your USB drive (make sure the size corresponds to the size of your USB drive).

Step 3: Now that we have your USB drive disk number,
type:select disk #

Step 4:To see the partitions on the USB drive,
type:list partition
If you don't know what  a partition is, you probably should not proceed. Anything past this point could result in the loss of the data on your computer if used improperly.

Step 5: Really be sure that the partitions make sense and that you do have your USB drive selected. Then, type:clean
This cleans all the configuration information off the drive.

Step 6: type:create partition primary

Step 7:Assuming you want a fat32 filesystem,
type:format fs=fat32 quick

And that's all there is to it. If you check in "My Computer", you will once again see a flash drive, unlike when it was formatted with an HFS+ filesystem.

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