You may want to erase your drive as a quick way to create space for new files.
Feel free to skip this section if you already know how to do it. Let’s start with a brief explanation of the correct way to reformat or erase drives using your Mac. How to erase or reformat a Drive using Disk Utility
Boot Into Recovery Mode to Erase Your Startup Disk Run First Aid to Repair Your Drive Before Erasing It Show All Devices and Erase the Parent Drive What if the Erase Button in Disk Utility is grayed Out?.How to erase or reformat a Drive using Disk Utility.
You can use that same technique to reformat it from the Windows format that it probably shipped with to the Mac OS Extended format. If you've bought a regular external drive to use for storing some files or archiving some things, creating clones or backups or anything like that. It is Mac formatted now and ready for use.This, of course, also works with any type of external drive. Those files that the manufacturer put on it are gone. I'm going to, instead, quit Disk Utility and I can see here it is now on the left and it is there and it is ready. Now it is reformatted.Now select it again and it is ready to reformat as another title. You can see it's going to go pretty fast.
I'll call it My Flash Drive or sometimes like if I'm going to be traveling with these I like to put my name or phone number or something there that can give somebody information that, you know, if it gets mixed up with somebody else's drive or something like that we can quickly figure out which one is there.I'm just going to call this one Files, or something like that, and then I'm going to click Erase. I'm going to select Erase and I'm going to change the format here and select the Mac OS Extended, which is what I want and I'm going to give it a real name. So I want to completely reformat it.How I'm going to do that is to select the drive at this level. I can also select the volume itself and see, indeed, it is formatted as MS-DOS. I can see some things about it here at the bottom like the size of it and things like that. I want to select the top level of the drive there. I can select it.I can select the volume that is on it called No Name or the top level. Now I'll see it appear, as well as my other drives, on the left. I'm going to bring up the Spotlight menu with Command Space, search for Disk Utility and run it. I just want it formatted normally.So in order to do that I'm going to run Disk Utility. This is just going to be a flash drive that I'm going to use to temporarily store things.
I just want to use this for plain, regular storage.Actually on this one, if I click on it here, I can see that there is information about how to download their software for Mac. So it's got some software and things like that. This tells me right away that this is a Windows formatted drive and everything that they have included here is meant for use in Windows. I just took it out of the packaging and I can now select it and see what's on it.Now, what's on it is, you can see right here, a dot exe file. I have two external drives hooked up and now when I plug in the USB flash drive I'm going to see that appear here as well. On the left side I can see on the sidebar Favorites and Devices. It's pointed to my Documents folder but that doesn't really matter. So, I'm going to show you what happens when you first plug in one of these USB drives and then how to get it reformatted so it's ready for your Mac.I've just got a plain Finder window open here. You can keep it formatted Windows, access the files on your Mac and on Windows as well.But if you only use Mac, like I do, then you want to reformat it to use just for Mac. This will be great if you actually want to use it to go between Mac and Windows.
You got it in a store or ordered it online and you want to start using it with your Mac.Now the problem is that most of these drives you are going to get are going to be already formatted but for Windows. On today's episode let's look at how to format a brand new USB thumb drive.So say you have just purchased a new USB flash drive. Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with.
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