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I have an external USB hard drive that I'd like to format to UDF for cross-compatibility with Windows and Macs. I tried exFAT, but for whatever reason, because of the block size (56KB) of the format, it's eaten up a huge portion of the disk space (~400GB actual data, ~900GB used disk space).

Is there a utility on Mac OS X to format hard drives to UDF?

I can't find any built-in to my version (OS X 10.8.2), and mkudffs doesn't appear to be in my $PATH, so I'm not sure where to go from here.

Nick Klauer
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3 Answers3

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Using the Terminal, you might be able to format a disk into UDF. I use the following command to format Blu-Ray-Disks:

newfs_udf -v "Untitled UDF" -r 2.60 /dev/diskX

You might want to first find out under what device name your actual disk is found.

Sascha Kaupp
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Someone did some research into how to format a flash drive with udf so it can be used on as many operating systems as possible. His findings are at http://sipa.ulyssis.org/2010/02/filesystems-for-portable-disks/ and there's a script to format the disk properly at http://sipa.ulyssis.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/udfhd.pl_.txt

Dan Benamy
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following project works just fine formatting any removable drive with UDF:

format-udf

Oleg Kokorin
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