Format a disk as FAT32 on your Mac, no Windows required

06 Jul 2020

If you have a need to format your SD card to FAT32, in my case following trying to flash OpenIP to WYZE camera, you can do it right from your mac.

We will use Disk Utility command line interface to achieve this. To get started, open a terminal window.

Find out the disk number for your SD card.

diskutil list

This should give you something like the following.

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                 Apple_APFS Container disk1         452.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:       Apple_KernelCoreDump                         655.4 MB   disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data OSXRESERVED             8.0 GB     disk0s4
   5:           Windows Recovery                         471.9 MB   disk0s5
   6:                        EFI NO NAME                 104.9 MB   disk0s6
   7:         Microsoft Reserved                         16.8 MB    disk0s7
   8:                  Apple_HFS Free                    38.3 GB    disk0s8

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +452.4 GB   disk1
                                 Physical Store disk0s2
   1:                APFS Volume Macintosh HD            377.9 GB   disk1s1
   2:                APFS Volume Preboot                 54.3 MB    disk1s2
   3:                APFS Volume Recovery                517.1 MB   disk1s3
   4:                APFS Volume VM                      2.1 GB     disk1s4

/dev/disk3 (external, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *31.3 GB    disk3
   1:         Microsoft Reserved                         33.6 MB    disk3s1
   2:           Linux Filesystem                         25.2 MB    disk3s2
   3:           Linux Filesystem                         268.4 MB   disk3s3
   4:           Linux Filesystem                         25.2 MB    disk3s4
   5:           Linux Filesystem                         268.4 MB   disk3s5
   6:           Linux Filesystem                         8.4 MB     disk3s6
   7:           Linux Filesystem                         100.7 MB   disk3s7
   8:           Linux Filesystem                         30.5 GB    disk3s8

You need to look for the SD card size and name if it's already formatted. In this case, disk3 is what we are looking for.

Simply running the following will format it to FAT32.

sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 'VOL_NAME' disk3

⚠️ The volume name must be all caps otherwise you will see error: does not appear to be a valid volume name for its file system.

You should now have an SD card with FAT32 formatting.

macOS FAT32