Your Mac computer comes with a handy utility appropriately called Disk Utility, which can be used to format any storage device. In this article, we are taking a closer look at the Disk Utility, which comes with all recent versions of the Mac OS X operating system, and how you can use it to format a USB drive on a Mac. Some flash drives have to be formatted first before you can store files on them. The drive will be formatted HFS+, but installing macOS High Sierra or Mojave will change the format to APFS, assuming you’re installing on an SSD.Not every flash drive out there can be used with a Mac computer right out of the box.

Disk Utility showing GUID option for drive formatĬlick Erase to wipe all the data that’s currently on the drive and reformat it for your macOS install.

If you selected the drive name instead of its description you won’t see the Scheme option. Set the format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the Scheme to GUID Partition Map. Disk Utility’s View option shows devices, not just volumes Select the drive description just above the drive name for the device you want to format. Now you should see your drive device descriptions with the drive name nested underneath. Disk Utility hides the GUID format option by defaultĬlick the View widget in the upper left corner of the Disk Utility window and choose Show All Devices. The app is hiding in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. Start by connecting the drive to your Mac. We’ll use an external drive for this example. Unfortunately, Disk Utility in macOS High Sierra doesn’t make that option easy to find.

Formatting a drive so you can install and boot macOS requires the GUID partition map.

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