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Problem formatting and external drive on a Mac.?
I am trying to format an external thumb drive on my MacBook Pro running High Sierra. I go to Disk Utilities, select the drive and click the <erase> button. But, the only things I see on the drop-down list are <Name> & <Format> plus the <security>, < cancel> & <erase> buttons. There is no <Scheme> entry at all, so I can t select the GUID PT file format ( or any other format ). Any ideas as to what I m doing wrong?
1 Answer
- 3 years ago
"I am trying to format an external thumb drive on my MacBook Pro running High Sierra."
You do not need to format any new drive. It left the factory formatted.
"There is no <Scheme> entry at all, so I can t select the GUID PT file format"
You can never select 'GUID PT file format', because GUID is not a file format. It is a partition scheme. Scheme is about partition table, not format. Select the whole drive – not the partition – and then choose the "PARTITION" tab.
You can choose either GUID Partition Table or Master Boot Record. The only compelling reason to choose GPT is if you would choose later to install macOS on this thumber, and I wouldn't recommend that. The macOS installer can only install onto GPT scheme drives. With either scheme, the NTFS format is read-only, the "MS-DOS" (a.k.a. FAT-32) and the exFAT (available in OS X 10.6.4 and later) are both read and write, but inefficient on larger volumes (over 32GB), and the Mac OS Extended format is perfect – unless you want to share it with a PC.
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