Thursday, February 26, 2009

SD Card FAT16 Format using OS X

I have a MacBook running OS X Leopard that will only format an SD memory card as FAT32. I have a toy camera that will only work with an SD card formatted as FAT16. So I've been using Lani's old Sony VAIO to do the formatting. But now I know how to format the SD card using my MacBook, and I'd better document the instructions here before I lose them.

In finder, open the Terminal application which is in the Applications folder under Utilities. Then enter this:

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk1 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "TIM" 1000M

where "TIM" is the name I give this SD card.


7/12/13 Update:
The major limitation of the FAT16 format is that the partition size is limited to 2 GB.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great!!

Anonymous said...

Thanks much!