formatting flash drive IMPOSSIBLE!

[mattbatt77]

Similar, but different from the other threads I have read here:

My flash drive, Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512 mb (older, no U3), has been formatted fat32 for 3 years, worked fine between mac and PC, then I added a 1TB maxtor to my G5, and it stopped recognizing my flash drive. That's not my real problem now, however.

SO, I finally said, ok, reformat. Here is the problem: first, I noticed disk utilities showing my drive as only a 247 MB drive and second, upon reformatting, I got the spinning ball of death. [I should mention here that I unplugged the maxtor 1tb drive and my second HD and uninstalled the drivers for the maxtor, just in case this was causing problems]. I tried other formats instead of MS-Dos fat 32 but it froze on all. Tried changing GUID, in disk utilities, no such luck = spinning ball o' death. So now it is somewhere between a semi-formatted drive and an unrecognizable drive. Great.

I have since taken my flash drive to my work PC to try and format as fat32. First, it only allows me to choose a size of 247 MB and second, this computer also won't format, saying an error occurred. I think I'll have better luck at formatting on the PC, so can you offer some software overrides?

My guess is that the drive is stuck with some weird partition and I need to get rid of that, and reformat. Windows says device is working fine btw.

Now what?

Thanks guys!

 

[mattbatt77]

btw, I just did the run > CMD
chkdsk f: /f

and dos says the type of file system is RAW. It can't do anything with RAW

 

[Harry Trent]

Sounds like the flash drive may have more than one partition. Use the Windows "diskpart" command with admin privileges to delete all partitions from the drive and start over. The command parameters you will be using with diskpart are "list disk", "select disk", "list partition", "select partition" and "delete partition" without quotes of course and with the appropriate disk and partition numbers added. There are tutorials on the internet to help with this.

If you format it in the Mac OS to FAT 32 or ExFat you must specify manually the MBR partition scheme is to be used an not the GUID. Windows won't work with a flash drive using a GUID partition table.

Using Windows Command Prompt with admin privileges is aka "elevated command privileges." Right click on the Command Prompt icon in Windows and choose "Run as Administrator" from the menu.