I have a thumb drive that I converted to APFS. How do I convert back to FAT32? Disk utility no longer shows that option. I have the latest Mojave release. I have iMac 2013
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Barry
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How Do I Convert An APFS Thumbdrive To FAT?
Comments: 9 Responses to “How Do I Convert An APFS Thumbdrive To FAT?”
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You should still have the option to convert to the old FAT32 format. It is called MS-DOS FAT, but it should be listed. I'm pretty sure that they are the same. It is easy enough to give it a try.
But maybe the problem you are seeing is that you are selecting the wrong thing in Disk Utility. If you have an APFS drive connected, you should see the drive type, under that the "Container" and then under that the volume. Selecting the volume will only give you the option to erase it and reformat as APFS. But if you select the drive itself, then you can erase and reformat as any of the options.
Of course, unless you really need to transfer files between your Mac and a very old Windows or DOS computer, you may want to use ExFAT, which I think works on anything recent.
I formatted an external drive to APFS to create a bootable Mojave installer (following bad advice from a website). It seems an APFS disk cannot be used as bootable installer. Now I'm trying to reformat the drive to HFS, but in Disk Utility, the only options are APFS. How to I reformat APFS to another file system?
Jean-Claude: Make sure you select the drive in the left sidebar of Disk Utility. If you select the Volume or Container of the drive, you can't change formats.
You can ignore question above. I found the answer.
That was the problem. There is this option "Show All Devices" that I didn't know about. Once I turned that on, I could see all levels of containers in the left sidebar. Thanks.
Gary,
Sorry for all these posts. I forgot to ask : do you have a tutorial on how to create a bootable installer for Mojave?
Jean-Claude: No, I don't have a tutorial on that. For almost all purposes, it is better to just boot into recovery mode instead. There really isn't much of a need for a bootable installer anymore.
I need an installer disk because there are corrupted files on my iMac and it won't boot. I have to to a clean install. Thanks.
Jean-Claude: You can do that through recovery mode. No need for an external drive. There is also Internet Recovery Mode. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201314