Create Windows-compatible USB sticks in El Capitan

25 October 2015, 06:00

More El Capitan woes, it seems, because the new Disk Utility app in El Capitan appears not to create Windows-Compatible USB sticks — even if the all-important option for Master Boot Record (MBR) and FAT32 formatting is selected when you click to Erase or Partition the stick.

It’s a bug and the fix is to close Disk Utility, open a Terminal window (it’s in the Utilities folder of the Applications list), and then paste in the following:

defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options 1

Then erase or partition the stick in the usual way using Disk Utility, after which you should find it’s now compatible with Windows.

This bug will probably be fixed in an upcoming release (well, you’d think it would be), so you might want to make a mental note to revert this change back to default values in future. The following will do the trick:

defaults delete com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options

Leave a comment...

OMG thanks so much for this! It was driving me crazy!

— Mike Spille · Nov 12, 04:12 PM · #

That didn’t work for me, but installing and using this Yosemite Disk Utility patched to work on El Capitan did work. At least with trying to get UNetbootin to recognize a flash drive.

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/files/file/480-disk-utility-patched-v2/

— Tomi "bgt" Suovuo · Sep 15, 12:15 AM · #

 
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