A woman came to me because she wanted some music copied to a USB flash drive. She wanted to play the music in her car through the USB plugin. When I copy music to flash drives, one thing I check is the file system format. For example, FAT32, NTSF, exFAT. From experience, I can tell you that FAT32 is the best to use.
It's most compatible with cameras and with the USB plugins on cars. If you right-click on any drive and go into properties, you can see what file format your drive is using.
This example is from my hard drive, which is NTFS.
Her drive was a 64GB DanDisk Cruzer Glide and formatted with the exFAT option. I wanted it formatted as FAT32, but the option was not available when I tried to format it. I inserted the drive and right-clicked on it when it displayed in File Explorer, clicked on format in the context menu. But NTFS and exFAT were the only two options.
Just a note: if you insert a smaller drive that originally had FAT32 as the file system, then that option would be available as the default. I have some Nexxtech 16GB drives that still give me the FAT32 option as default.
I knew this could be done through command prompt or Powershell but couldn't remember the command at the time. One of those "on the tip of my tongue moments". Found the answer online and a interesting utility if cmd prompts aren't your thing.
So insert your drive, take notice of the letter assigned to it. In my case, it was F:
In the search box either type cmd to open the Command Prompt or Powershell to open Windows Powershell, and then type the following and press enter:
format /FS:FAT32 f:
It will ask you to insert the drive and press Enter even when it's already inserted. So just press Enter and wait.
Replace the f with your actual drive letter. Note: Windows cannot format a drive this way over 32GB with FAT32.
I was originally searching for the cmd prompt option but came across this first and gave it a try. I went online and found a simple utility to help you format the drive in FAT32.
FAT32 Format: http://ridgecrop.co.uk/index.htm?guiformat.htm
There is no install and not bundled with any other software at the time of this writing. Just put in your flash drive, open the program, select your drive letter and click on Start. You can put in a Volume Label if you want and check or uncheck Quick Format. By default, it's checked and I left it that way.
After formatting, I then just copied the songs over to the drive.
Either way, when finished, you'll have a formatted FAT32 flash drive. The only limits with FAT32 are your individual file sizes cannot be greater than 4GB and your drive can't be greater than 8TB. Don't think there are too many 8TB drives floating around, yet, but as you can see, this format is still very versatile. This flash drive was for MP3 files, so I don't think I got anything to worry about.