[sithpigeon]

I have a Transcend V35 2GB flash drive that I use for school and I today while I was working on reinstalling windows on a computer it was plugged into I accidentally used the delete partition tool from the windows xp disc setup on my flash drive(I was doing a test install on a crappy hard drive that wasn't working and the only thing that showed up was the flash drive which I forgot was still plugged in). Needless to say I lost a lot of my school work but now I'm trying to reformat it and Windows can't seem to do it. I attached a screen shot of the dialog and when I click start I get "Windows was unable to format the disk." It seems like Windows can no longer read how large it is. I think I need a special utility for this but I'm not sure. If anyone knows how I can reformat my drive that would be great.

Attached Files

•  flashformat.bmp   299.3KB   510 downloads

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have you tried using the drop-down box and choosing fat32 (xp can only format to fat and fat32 on flash/usb sticks) then formating ?

[hawklord]

have you tried using the drop-down box and choosing fat32 (xp can only format to fat and fat32 on flash/usb sticks) then formating ?

[sithpigeon]

Yes, the only thing I can select is FAT when you should normally be able to select a bunch of file systems. That's the same for all the other options as well. They are stuck at what they show. Like I said I think it has something to do with the XP CD messing it up.

[hawklord]

the only other thing i can suggest is checkdisk,

right click the usb drive in 'my computer'
choose 'properties'
click on the 'tools' tab
click on 'check now'
tick the 2 boxes in the next window
click 'start'

if that doesn't work then maybe someone else will have more productive options

[sithpigeon]

I tried your idea and it didn't seem to do anything. After some looking around it says the file system is RAW and the partition is Master Boot Record which I set in the xp setup cd. It still knows what kind of device it is also and how much space it has but the space is all unallocated because I couldn't reformat it in the setup disk.

[sithpigeon]

After figuring out it was a RAW partition a quick Google search turned up this for anyone else trying to solve the problem. Worked great.
http://www.techspot....topic17341.html