erase

Erase and format a USB flash drive on a Mac

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Hi, this is Chip Wood. Here I have a 16 gig flash drive, but even if I delete all the files from it,

I hit command 'I' and we see that some of the space is still not available, and that's because flash drives have a hidden trash file that is full of deleted data.

To purge that file, open your finder, go to 'applications,' expand 'utilities,' double-click 'disk utility,' and select your flash drive. 

Hit 'erase,' and under 'format,' select 'MS DOS  FAT,' and that'll format your drive to MS-DOS FAT32,

which is compatible with both Mac  and Windows.

Click 'erase,' give it a minute or so,

and click 'done.' And here you see that  most of the space has been recovered,  

though on every flash drive there's a portion  that can't be deleted because it's reserved  

for running firmware. If you found this helpful, please subscribe for additional short tutorials.


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