How to Format USB to FAT32 in 3 Different Ways?

Many users hope to format USB to FAT32 for different purposes. In this post, you’ll learn both why and how to do it.

Why format USB to FAT32 Windows 10?

FAT32, short for File Allocation Table 32, is a disk format or filing system used to organize the files stored on a disk. Nowadays, many electronic devices like PS4, Xbox One, and Android Phone supports FAT32. Besides, it’s compatible with many operating systems like Mac, Windows, and so on. So, it’s pretty clear that the reason why some people format USB to FAT32 is that they wish to make their USBs work on some of those electronic devices or operating systems mentioned above.

How to format USB to FAT32?

What’s the best way to format your USB flash drives to FAT32? Factually, there’re 3 different ways that help get it done.

Using Disk Management

Disk Management is an inbuilt utility of Windows 10. With it, you can perform different operations in managing disk including disk format, disk deletion, and disk volume shrinking. Now, let’s have a look at the steps to format USB to FAT32 by using it.

1. Right-click “This PC” on the desktop and select “Manage” in the popup menu.

2. Select “Disk Management” from the left under the tab of “Storage”.

3. Select the USB drive and right-click on its partition. Then, select “Format”.

4. Select “FAT32” as the output file system and hit “OK”.

Wait for the progress to be 100% completed. It may take several minutes depending on the size of the USB drive.

Using DiskPart

In computing, DiskPart is a command-line disk partition utility included in Windows 2000 and later Microsoft OS, replacing its predecessor, fdisk. Similar to Disk Management, DiskPart can also help users do many operations related to managing disks and partitions.

1. In the search box on the lower left, type “diskpart” and select “Run as administrator”.

2. In the opened window of DiskPart, run the given command lines below.

*list disk

*select disk n (“n” refer to the sequence number of the USB stick you want to format)

*list partition

*select partition m (“m” is the USB stick partition sequence number)

*format fs=fat32 quick

Note: After the format, you can assign a drive letter to it and then, access it from File Explorer.

Using third-party freeware

Disk Management and DiskPart are both indeed good Windows’ inbuilt utilities. They’re totally free and easy-to-use for beginners. However, they have their own limit. If you try to format a USB drive over 32GB, then, you’ll find there’s no option of FAT32 in Disk Management or you’ll receive an error message “The volume is too big for FAT32” when using DiskPart. Namely, if the USB is 64GB, 128GB or even larger, you can’t format it into FAT32 in the traditional way.

Fortunately, this time, I’ll introduce a much more powerful third-party free partition manager – AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard – that is able to format disks of all sizes into FAT32 easily. More than this useful feature, the freeware also allows you to directly convert a NTFS partition into FAT32 or FAT32 into NTFS without any data loss.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard and wait until you loading onto the interface where there’re all disks and partitions.

Step 2. Right-click on the USB partition and select “Format Partition”.

Step 3. Select FAT32 among the given file systems and hit “OK” to proceed”.

Step 4. After returning to the main interface, click on “Apply” and then, “Proceed as the image shows.

Conclusion

How to format USB to FAT32? In the beginning of the content, I explained the traditional way – using Windows 10 inbuilt Disk Management and DiskPart. They’re both feasible ways but have a limit – they can’t format a disk over 32GB into FAT32. So, under this circumstance, another more powerful alternative – AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard – was brought in. It only takes a few steps to fully format USB drives of all sizes into FAT32.