Q1: How to format USB flash drive using FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT? A1) In most Windows systems while formatting a USB Stick/Flash Drive, file system choices are presented to you – NTFS, FAT, FAT32 or exFAT. FAT or FAT 32 file system is the option selected by default for formatting a USB flash drive. The two ways in which you can format your USB Flash Drive are:. Q2: How to Recover Data after formatting USB flash drive using FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT?
Format drive to exFAT in Windows 10 so it is read-and-write in Mac OS as well. This tutorial explains how to format external hard drive/USB flash drive exFAT in Windows 10. Whether you’re formatting an internal drive, external drive, or USB flash drive, Windows makes it possible to choose exFAT is a file system optimized specifically for flash drives. Introduced in 2006, it’s designed to be a lightweight Additionally, NTFS has read-only compatibility with Mac devices, a.
A2) Ideally, you should take a back-up of your data before formatting. But sometimes, even after all the precautions, you end up losing your data.
In such cases, to recover multimedia files from formatted USB flash drive/stick, you should try using a as a sure shot solution. To know more. USB flash drives are the little stick-like devices that we carry along in our pockets as portable external storage. But these little devices pack quite a punch; they can double up as your mobile movie library, photo collection, backup drive, OS boot volume, or just a way to transfer stuff from one computer to another. Each time you wish to use them for a unique purpose, it requires cleaning them and sometimes even formatting them to a file system suited to the target environment.
Formatting is also a good way to rid the memory stick of unwanted errors or virus/malware programs. One important thing to remember is always taking a backup of your data before beginning the format procedure. When it comes to formatting a USB drive, which format should you go for – FAT or NTFS?
Or any other? Moreover, how can you change the format of your USB drive from FAT to NTFS to exFAT or FAT32? Let’s answer these questions one at a time. Which file system should I choose for formatting my USB?
When it comes to formatting a USB drive, which format should you go for – FAT or NTFS? Or any other? Moreover, how can you change the format size of your USB drive from FAT to NTFS to exFAT or FAT32? Let’s answer these questions one at a time. In most Windows systems, while formatting a USB 4 file system choices are presented to you – NTFS, FAT, FAT32 or exFAT.
You should choose one that suits your USB purpose as well as target environment. Additionally, here are the benefits of each of these file systems to help you make your choice. Benefits of NTFS file system If you select NTFS file system, you get:. Better disk space management. Less space wastage. Increased reliability and security with file encryption. Small data clusters.
Compressed data so as to save disk space. Ability to create permissions for individual files and folders. Ability to read / write files larger than 32GB and up to maximum partition size. Benefits of FAT / FAT32 file system Note: For USB flash drives with capacity larger than 32GB, FAT / FAT32 formatting option is not available. If you select FAT or FAT32 file system:. Faster performing USB owing to write operations lesser.
Less memory usage. Quick disk scanning. Compatibility with almost all operating systems. Less space is dedicated to the file system data to allow more free space to hold other data. Benefits of exFAT file system If you select exFAT file system, you get:. Ability to create partitions larger than 32GB. Better disk space management.
Ability to read / write files larger than 4GB. So if you’re USB flash drive which has a capacity greater than 32GB, you should select NTFS or exFAT. Other than that, you should choose the format that suits your work. For example, if you use the USB on multiple operating systems, going for FAT would be better. How to format USB to FAT / FAT32 / NTFS / exFAT using Windows Explorer? FAT or FAT 32 file system is the option selected by default for formatting a USB flash drive on Windows XP.
FAT or FAT32 is also the default file system most music players in cars recognise. So if on plugging your USB into your car’s music player you’ve faced an error saying – “cannot read”, check its file system and change it. Here’s the procedure to format USB to NTFS / FAT / FAT32 / exFAT: Step 1: Plug in the memory stick into your computer and allow it to be detected. Once it is recognised, you should see an Autoplay dialogue box pop up asking you to choose the next action. If it doesn’t appear, you can open My Computer and see if the USB is detected as a newly mounted volume. You can also find the USB under Disk Drives in Device Manager (right-click on My Computer - Manage).
Step 2: Right-click on the USB drive shown in My Computer and select “Format”. This will open a dialogue box displaying the formatting options.
Step 3: Select the desired file system from NTFS, FAT, FAT32 or exFAT from the “File System” drop-down, then punch in the name that you wish to assign to the USB drive under “Volume label” and also select a “Format option”. Step 4: Once you’ve made sure all options are correct, and you have a backup of the important data on the USB, click on “Start” to initiate the process. When prompted, click on “Ok” to confirm that you wish to erase the data on the drive and format it. How to format USB to NTFS / exFAT / FAT / FAT32 using Command Prompt?
Step 1: Plug in the memory stick into your computer and allow it to be detected. Step 2: Open Command Prompt (Start - Accessories - Command Prompt or Start - Run - type “cmd” - Enter) Step 3: Supposing your USB drive is assigned the letter “E”: type the following command in the Command Prompt: For FAT: format E: /fs:FAT For FAT32: format E: /fs:FAT32 For NTFS: format E: /fs:NTFS For exFAT: format E: /fs:EXFAT Step 4: When prompted, press Y (for Yes) or N (for No) to continue or stop the formatting. Things to remember when formatting to NTFS When formatting to NTFS file system, you need to remember to enable the “removal policy” of the USB to the “better performance” option.
Here’s how to do this:. Right-click on the USB and select “ Properties”.
Under the “ Hardware” tab choose the USB drive from the listed disks. Click on “ Properties”. Select “policies” - “ better performance”.
Click “ OK”. You have formatted your USB drive successfully!
Now What if you want to again get back your precious photos, audios or videos??? The best possible solution to go for will be to download and run. The added benefit of keeping Stellar Photo Recovery Software in your system is that you can take a backup of your entire drive.
The top menu bar of the main screen section of the software includes a ‘ Create Image‘ option which is used to create an image of your entire drive. This image can be used as a backup for recovering data at a later stage. To recover back your multimedia files, if lost accidentally, you can try the demo version of the software absolutely free: Final Words Hope our pointers above will help you the next time you need to format your memory stick. Always remember to backup your data before beginning the formatting process and choose a file system that suits your requirement. However, if you want to recover data from a corrupt or inaccessible USB drive, read our. Dear Tim, The FAT file allocation system is named for its method of organization, the file allocation table, which resides at the beginning of the volume.
There is no organization to the FAT folder structure. When you need to format your USB to FAT/FAT16 because your device (like a DVD player or digital decoder etc) only support FAT file systems. But there is no option FAT on format window, so you cant change it to FAT. So why it happened?
Because your USB size is more than MAX Volume size of FAT. 1.FAT/FAT16: Max volume size 4GB, Max file size 2GB. 2.FAT32: Max volume size 2TB, Max file size 4GB. 3.exFAT: Max volume size 128PB, Max file size 16EB. It means if your USB flash drive is 8GB or more, it will not support the FAT format.
For any and all reading this topic, it should be made known that MS very recently dropped all further development of exFAT. It was never finished as it was (a final specification was never released).
If you need to share a drive between platforms, then the best supported options are: 1) Format the shared drive as NTFS and install on your Mac. 2) Format the shared drive as HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) and install in Windows. I have tried the first, and it works very well. There's also, but Paragon's software is cheaper and does the same thing. Can't comment on how well the Windows software for Mac formatted drives work. Doghair wrote: I recently formatted a 16GB drive on Mountain Lion as exFAT.
It was NOT readable by a Windows XP machine, but was happily readable on a Windows 7 machine (or was it Windows 8? No idea of Vista's behavior. ExFAT has to be formatted on the Windows machine and XP needs exFAT installed as a free download from Microsoft. Don't buy the F.U.D. There would be tanks in Redmond if Microsoft even attempted to discontinue support for a drive format they released. With NTFS one just has to keep paying over and over as Microsoft makes changes to it for licence fees they collect from companies using it. A truely open drive format is needed, but with two corporations playing games for profit by controling hardware and software it's kind of hard to implement.
Why Apple formats exFAT in a manner that can't be easily read by Windows remains a mystery. Kurt, what is your reference for saying that MS has dropped development for exFAT? It was another member of these forums. Normally very accurate in their statements, so I assumed them to be correct.
I looked again myself and found out this is not the case. At least, not exactly. What MS did was make a change in Windows 8 so that you cannot format an internal drive as exFAT. You can still format any type of external drive that way (hard drive, USB drives). The whole purpose of exFAT was to allow easy transfer of large files between platforms in a format that didn't require third party drivers on either the Mac or Windows to read the drive.
To make sense of why MS would cut off the use of exFAT for internal hard drives, it has to be understood that exFAT still doesn't have a final specification. In other words, it's still a work in progress.
So Microsoft's thinking is probably something like this; 'Don't use exFAT on an internal drive. Use NTFS, which is known to be stable and reliable. It's okay to use exFAT on external drives since you can get the original data again from an NTFS drive if the external exFAT drive is having trouble.' Hi Kurt, I'm using Mac MINI for years.
Recently i bought a 1 TB Mac mini last month. As usual, I partitioned the Hard drive in to Macintosh (250 GB) and ABC (750 GB). Last week i was move files of more than 4 GB so i decided to format a USB using ex-fat. Unfortunately both my USB and my partitioned hard drive ABC (750 GB) had same names. I mistakenly formatted the partitioned hard drive using ex-fat, ending in all the data erased as well cannot find the partitioned hard drive on My finders. Only Macintosh (250 GB) is visible. My question is 1.
How to bring back my partitioned hard drive ABC (750 GB)? Is it possible to retrieve the lost data? It's odd that the mistakenly formatted drive won't show on the desktop. An exFAT drive should still be visible. This won't be easy.
Typical Windows recovery software depends on the file table to determine what files are on the drive and where to recover them from. Formatting the drive wiped out the file table. But this was a Mac formatted partition to begin with. You can give a try.
It will run as a working demo and allow you to recover a few files to see if it works. I recommend this one in particular because it has an option called Salvage All Files, which will attempt to recover data from a drive that won't mount on the desktop. This is a very long process, especially on such a large drive/partition. It works by examining the entire drive for BOF (beginning of file) markers, and then recovering whatever it can. Do not write anything to the drive you need to recover data from. If you know there's more data on the ABC drive to recover than will fit on the 250 GB partition, then you'll need an external drive large enough to hold the recovered data. You can't save it back to the same drive you're recovering data from.
One, the software won't let you. And two, that's because writing recovered data to the drive could destroy other data that hasn't been recovered yet. Apple Footer. This site contains user submitted content, comments and opinions and is for informational purposes only. Apple may provide or recommend responses as a possible solution based on the information provided; every potential issue may involve several factors not detailed in the conversations captured in an electronic forum and Apple can therefore provide no guarantee as to the efficacy of any proposed solutions on the community forums.
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