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%"

@tuxera NTFS for Mac Lets You Easily Read And Write NTFS Partitions

@tuxera NTFS for Mac lets you easily read and write NTFS partitions.

This is the kind of high quality software that gets you excited about your job (in software) again!

If plan to live in the modern universe running a Mac and you are not running this then you are missing out pleasant and easy operations on NTFS partitions.

Copied 107GB in 21 minutes

  • GB/Minute (/ 107.0 21.0) 5.095238095238095
  • MB/Second (/ (* 1000 107.0) (* 21.0 60)) 84.92063492063492

@coriolissystems iPartition Makes Partition Management on OS X A Happy Dream

@coriolissystems iPartition makes partition management on OS X a happy dream.

It does only what you expect.

If you have worked with OS X’s Disk Utility enough you know how unpredictable it can be. I don’t know why it is that way, but you do have to be careful and thoughtful even if you are in iPartition. I suppose that it has to do with the OS and neither of the tools.

I just know that iPartition makes it trivially easy to resize and recreate partitions and on OS X 10.11 it is impossible to do so with Disk Utility!