How To Format USB Drive For A Printer Or Camera In macOS

Today I had to store a scanner’s scan onto a USB thumb drive. Unfortunately there weren’t any thumb drives sitting around that worked. Long story short I had to format the partition to be “device friendly.” What device do you ask? Cameras, printers, and scanners come to mind. What partition type are you wondering?

You might have easily guessed MS-DOS formatted. You might have easily forgotten like me it needs to be a MBR partition though. Doh!

WARNING: Unless you hold yourself responsible for the outcome don’t proceed.

Run diskutil list to see where your thumb drive is mounted.

Customize the command to specify the correct path now.

The command deletes everything on the drive and creates a single partition taking up the entire drive.

DOUBLE WARNING: IF YOU DO THIS WRONG YOU’LL LOSE ALL YOUR DATA!

The error would be specifying the wrong disk drive and poof your data is gone.

You seem to know what you are doing though.

Here is the command―you have to customize it for your thumb drive:

sudo diskutil partitionDisk <<<thumb drive name>>> MBR MS-DOS "PRINTORSCAN" "100%"

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