Partition USB disk with FAT16 on Mac OS X
A previous article explained how to upgrade the BIOS on an Eee Box by using a USB memory formatted with FAT16.
As far as I have found, formatting with FAT16 can not be done through the GUI on Mac OS X. Instead one has to use the terminal.
First type “diskutil list” to see the devices on your system, making very sure that the following command is applied to the USB flash drive and not to a drive with important data. You have been warned!
diskutil partitiondisk /dev/disk1 1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT16" "Data" 512M
The arguments have the following meanings:
-
/dev/disk1: The disk device to be partitioned and formatted
1: The number of partitions
MBRFormat: The partition format
MS-DOS FAT16: The partition type
Data: The partition name
512M: The size of the partition
