If Windows won't format your USB drive to the FAT32 file system, remove the write protection or use CMD, PowerShell, or free software to do the same.

If you need a USB drive that's widely compatible with different devices, you may want to format it to FAT32. Here's how to do so on Mac and PC.

This guide show how to format a USB drive to FAT32 file system using File Explorer and Disk Management tool on a Windows 11/10 PC.

Note that you'll need to Google up a program to do the formatting if you're using Windows XP or newer, since it won't format such a large partition as FAT32 by default. Like this one.

Why can’t I format my SD card to FAT32? The most typical cause of this is that your SD card is too huge, exceeding the 32GB limit of Windows’ FAT32 file system.

In fact, Windows is able to read larger FAT32 drives if they’ve been partitioned elsewhere, but Windows itself can’t format drives in FAT32 to sizes greater than 32GB. Because Microsoft.