

- #Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 how to#
- #Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 mac os#
- #Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 password#
Though not a usual thing, the issue of an external hard drive or flash drive not showing up on Mac happens sometimes. Did you come across the situation that no matter how many times you try to connect the USB drive with a Mac computer, the USB drive is not showing up anywhere? Why this time Mac won't recognize a connected USB you may wonder. Once the process is complete, copy across your sensitive data to the blank USB flash drive, where it will be automatically encrypted and secured with a password.Mac Won't Recognize USB, What Should You Do?Ĭommonly, when you insert a USB drive in the USB port on a Mac computer, the drive will soon appear on the desktop or hide in the Finder, letting you access, view, and manage data on it. Click Erase once again, and wait for your disk to be formatted and encrypted.
#Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 password#
Enter your new password, enter it once more to verify, include a password hint if desired, then click Choose.
#Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 mac os#
Now click the Format dropdown menu and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).(It's important to do this first before the next step, otherwise you won't see the encryption option in the Format dropdown.) Next, click the Scheme dropdown menu and select GUID Partition Map.not the volume name that's listed beneath it). Select your USB flash drive in the sidebar by clicking its top-level device name (i.e.In the Disk Utility toolbar, click the View button and select Show All Devices if it isn't already ticked.Launch Disk Utility, located on your Mac in Applications/Utilities.
#Reformat verbatim external drive for mac to windows 10 how to#
How to Encrypt a USB Flash Drive in Disk Utilityīefore proceeding, make sure you've copied any data on the USB flash drive to a safe location, like your Mac's internal disk. If you ever want to decrypt the USB flash drive in future, right-click (or Ctrl-click) its disk icon, select Decrypt "" from the contextual menu, and enter the password to turn off encryption protection. Check the box, and whenever you attach the USB stick to your Mac again you won't be prompted to enter the password and you'll have automatic access to it, just like any other drive. Note that the prompt includes an option for macOS to remember this password in my keychain. You'll now be able to access the contents of the USB flash drive as usual, but if you physically detach it and re-attach it to your Mac you'll be prompted to enter the password. The encryption process depends on how much data you have on the USB flash drive, but you'll know it's completed when its disk icon disappears and re-mounts.

(Don't forget this, otherwise you'll lose access to any data stored on the USB drive!) Once you've chosen a password, verify it, add a meaningful hint if desired, and click Encrypt Disk.

When you select Encrypt, Finder will prompt you to create a password, which you'll need to enter the next time you attach the USB flash drive to a Mac. To resolve this, you'll need to erase and encrypt the USB drive in Disk Utility – before that though, copy any data on the drive to another location for temporary safekeeping.) (Note that if you don't see the Encrypt option in the dropdown menu, your USB flash drive hasn't been formatted with a GUID partition map. With that in mind, here's how to securely encrypt your USB flash drive.Īttach the USB flash drive to your Mac and locate its disk icon on your desktop, in a Finder window, or in the Finder sidebar, then right-click (or Ctrl-click) it and select Encrypt "".

If this is a requirement, you'll need to use a third-party encryption solution like VeraCrypt. Note that the following method is only compatible with Macs – you won't be able to access data on the encrypted drive using a Windows machine. Using this convenient Finder option, we're going to show you how to encrypt a USB flash drive (or "thumb drive"), which is useful if you're traveling light and want to take sensitive data with you for use on another Mac.įinder uses XTS-AES encryption, the same encryption that FileVault 2 uses to prevent access to data on a Mac's startup disk without a password. In macOS Mojave, you can choose to encrypt and decrypt disks on the fly right from the desktop.
