Formatting a USB stick or external drive into MS-DOS FAT32 file system.

We will be using gpart utility as well as newfs_msdos

Follow these steps, run as root.

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# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1k count=1
# gpart create -s mbr da0
# gpart add -t "\!11" da0
# newfs_msdos -F32 /dev/da0s1

Line 1: We will first clear the partition info using dd command, make sure you use the right device name: /dev/da0 in my case.

Line 2: Create an MBR (Master Boot Record) on that device. Line 3: Add a new mbr partition, we use !11 type for mbr (with proper escaping for BASH),

when I used the mbr type gpart didn’t recognize it.

Line 4: Constructs a new MS-DOS FAT file system of type 32.