The Terminal is where all the command line magic happens in OSX, so don’t be afraid if it sounds complicated! Type ‘diskutil list’ into terminal to get a list of every hard drive connected to your Mac – make sure you search for SD’s rather than hard drives – i’ve done this before and lost everything on my computer because I formatted the wrong thing!!! How to Format an SD or Micro SD Card on Your Mac Click the blue “Erase” button once you’re ready to erase and reformat your card with the filesystem of choice.

Erase your card by performing a “Format” on it - select the type of filesystem you want to use from the “Format” menu (e.g., MS-DOS or ExFat). Click the “Erase” tab at the top of Disk Utility once you’ve selected your memory card from the left-hand pane. Following that, click on the name of the memory card you inserted (it may be labeled as something like NO NAME or UNTITLED). Open “Disk Utility” found in your “Utilities” folder - just search for it using Spotlight Search if you can’t find it or don’t know where it’s located. This will likely mount the memory card on your desktop for easy access.

Insert the memory card into your computer’s reader if it isn’t already. Formatting an SD Memory Card on a Mac & Macbook Pro While OS X Lion does include support for exFAT, this article assumes you are using an earlier version of the Mac operating system. Note that performing this procedure will delete all data currently on the SD card. If not, you may need to unmount it manually before removing it from your computer. After completing these steps, ejecting and removing the SD card should cause your Mac to automatically mount it on the Desktop. For example, if you named your SD card “MySD”, you would type:ĭiskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS “MySD” /dev/disk2Īfter formatting is complete, type exit at the Terminal prompt to quit Terminal. Diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS “NAME” /dev/disk2īe sure to replace NAME in the command above with the name of your SD card.

How to format sd card in mac