eHow launches Android app: Get the best of eHow on the go.
By eHow Computers Editor
One of the biggest advantages of formatting your flash drive in MS-DOS (for Mac) or FAT32 (for Windows) is that you can access the stored data on every Windows installed machine regardless of the operating system. Formatting to Ext 2/3 allows you to access the data only on Linux. Here is how to format a flash drive.... Read full How To Article
amandakon
published this on
May 09, 2009
Although I knew that formatting my flash drive would effectively erase my flash drive, I never knew that this tool could also be used to ensure compatibility on both PC and Apple computers. Because I frequent plenty of computer labs, I have definitely been in the situation where I needed access to a PC, but the only thing available was...
The actual process of formatting the flash drive was actually very familiar, as I had gone through most of the steps before when clearing out old flash drives. I simply stuck my flash drive into the USB port, and then located it in the "My Computer" section. From there, however, the process is just slightly different. You right-click your flash drive, and then select "NTFS" or "Fat 32" as your format.
However, as states at the end of the article, if you want to ensure compatibility with a Mac, you will need to use FAT 16 for any flash drive under 256 MB. This was of great help to me, as the flash drive I was using was 256 MB and I was able to sucessfully format it to the smaller standard.
Another bit of useful information in this How-To is the alternate formatting process. Although I was able to use the first Windows-based method rather effectively, it is nice to know that there is another way to do it in case your OS starts acting up.
Re-formatting my flash drive was a very easy process, and even though I knew a lot about it beforehand, I have to say that the extra tips certainly are helpful for the pro formatter. As one who craves cross-compatibility and is a fan of the backup plan, there were plenty of clear and conscise tips to follow if you need a certain type of formatting.
Although I am not a user, I was also happy to see instructions for Linux in this How-To. Linux is definitely under-represented in most troubleshooting/how-to computing articles, so it was great to see instructions for this underdog platform.
Did this? Planning to do this? Be generous, share the way you've completed your projects with the community.
I Did ThisCopyright © 1999-2009 eHow, Inc. Use of this web site constitutes acceptance of the eHow Terms of Use † and Privacy Policy †. en-US Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. † requires javascript
