How To format sd card to FAT32 on Catlina?

Question

I'm trying to format my sd card to FAT32 for my wii u when I try I only get FAT16

I have Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Mac OS Extended (Case Senstive, Journaled) MS-DOS (FAT) ((this is the one that gives me FAT16) ExFAT

I'm using an old 3ds Sdcard that I already made a backup of and wiped.

Answer 1

macOS chooses FAT16 or FAT32 depending on the SD Card's size. Under 2GB it picks FAT16, over FAT32.
You can force it by Applescript or in Terminal to use FAT32 on smaller cards…

I had a similar script I built myself for a more complex task than this in an answer on Ask Different, but I found on SuperUser this answer which directly addresses the question exactly as stated & includes how to discover the correct card, & therefore doesn't need my complex Applescript solution

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How do you format a 2 GB SD card to FAT32 (preferably with Disk Utility)?

If you're comfortable with using the Terminal, try this:

First, look at the partition table by running this command:

diskutil list

You should see something like this:

/dev/disk1
#:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *16.0 GB    disk1
1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
2:                  Apple_HFS Example                 15.7 GB    disk1s2

The partition we want to change is /dev/disk1.

We want to change the device to an MBR-formatted FAT32 partition. To do that, run this command:

sudo diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 NAME MBRFormat
/dev/disk1

where NAME is the name you want to give to the disk.

As mentioned in the comments, you cannot put square brackets into the volume's name lest things mess up. To avoid having everything fail, simply ensure that there are no square brackets in the FAT32 volume's new name.

Note: The NAME can fail if not UPPERCASE in many cases.