Get USB drives formatted in El Capitan to work in Windows 10
Posted on: November 14, 2015
El Capitan (Mac OS 10.11) rejiggered the stock Disk Utility programme to be more visually pleasing.
However, form no longer meets function because USB drives formatted in El Capitan may not be recognised in Windows 10 even if you use the exFAT file format.
I discovered this when trying to create thumb drives that worked across both operating systems. I had no trouble doing this in previous versions of Mac OS, only in El Capitan.
I discovered a solution from Reddit that worked for me.
- If open, quit Disk Utility
- Start the Terminal utility
- Run the following Command: defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options 1
- Relaunch Disk Utility
- Format your USB device with MBR Partition (Master Boot Record) and exFAT file system
The command in step 3 seems to activate a function that was previously on by default in previous versions. With Disk Utility put in this state, exFAT-formatted USB devices will now work with OSX and Windows.
4 Responses to "Get USB drives formatted in El Capitan to work in Windows 10"
2 | Dr Ashley Tan
November 14, 2015 at 8:41 am
Daniel Taylor: mentioned this in Get USB drives formatted in El…. via twitter.com
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3 | marty
May 7, 2016 at 11:50 pm
it does not work on my flash drive.. tsk.. it’s already getting into my nerves!
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4 | sayan hussain
August 25, 2016 at 1:59 pm
still my problem is not solved after doing this though I have a sixteen gb pendrive disk utilty is showing sixteen point six gb is free plus it is showing it consists of minus thirty two mb files
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Another dot in the blogosphere? 
November 14, 2015 at 8:10 am
Daniel Taylor: mentioned this in Get USB drives formatted in El…. via twitter.com
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