USB Drives On Ventura Provide Limited Permissions

[KevinSR]

Morning everyone. I could use some assistance with USB drives, formatting them and their permissions on MacOS Ventura please. When inserting a brand new USB thumb drive into my Macbook Air M1 using Ventura 13.6.3 it automatically formats to MS Dos Fat32 and provides only custom access with no option to change them. They are not shared folders. I've tried using Disc Utility to reformat them to APFS but it's greyed out. I'm not trying to create a bootable disc, just extra storage I have full permissions to manipulate. Is there any way around this?

 

[Bigwaff]

When inserting a brand new USB thumb drive into my Macbook Air M1 using Ventura 13.6.3 it automatically formats to MS Dos Fat32 and provides only custom access with no option to change them. They are not shared folders. I've tried using Disc Utility to reformat them to APFS but it's greyed out. I'm not trying to create a bootable disc, just extra storage I have full permissions to manipulate. Is there any way around this?

Most flash thumb drives come preformmatted as FAT32. Insert the thumb drive, launch DiskUtility, and make sure to select menu View > Show All Devices. Select the top most item in the tree for your thumb drive. You should be able to erase and reformat.

 

[KevinSR]

Most flash thumb drives come preformmatted as FAT32. Insert the thumb drive, launch DiskUtility, and make sure to select menu View > Show All Devices. Select the top most item in the tree for your thumb drive. You should be able to erase and reformat.

Reformat to what? Which fomat should I use that will give me full access & permissions?

 

[DeltaMac]

If you will be using the thumb drive on ONLY Macs, then insert the thumb drive. Launch Disk Utility.
Make sure that "Show All Devices" is selected in the View menu.
Choose your thumb drive device name above the drive name (often will have MEDIA at the end of the device name)
Click Erase, then change "Scheme" to "GUID Partition Map"
Change Format to something else. I like Mac OS Extended (journaled). Still the most versatile choice, I think.
Or, use APFS. I would avoid the case-sensitive choices, unless you are sure it will work for you.
Name the drive whatever you like. Click the Erase button.

(If you will be using this thumb drive on Windows, then ExFAT would be a good choice for format.
That would depend on your use, of course.)

 

[KevinSR]

Thank you so much. This worked perfectly.