If your USB drive is larger than 32 GB, you'll need to use a third-party program like Rufus to format it.
---
title: Format a USB drive to FAT32
subtitle: How to use Rufus to format a USB drive to FAT32.
author: Kris Koishigawa
date: October 16, 2020
source: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-format-a-usb-drive-to-fat32-on-windows-10/
snippet: https://jonlabelle.com/snippets/view/markdown/format-a-usb-drive-to-fat32
notoc: false
---
If your USB drive is larger than 32 GB, you'll need to use a third-party program
like [Rufus](https://rufus.ie/) to format it.
There are lots of other programs that can format USB drives, but Rufus is really
small and portable. This means you can stick Rufus right on a USB drive, plug it
into any Windows computer, and format other drives on the go.
After you [download Rufus](https://rufus.ie/), double click on the `.exe` file
to start the application.
1. Make sure your USB drive is selected, then click the **Boot selection**
dropdown and select **Non bootable**:
2. Next, click the **File system** dropdown and select **FAT32**. Also, feel
free to change the name of your USB drive under **Volume label**:
