Re-format thumb drive

Question

I was trying to put the Windows 8 Consumer Preview onto a thumb drive, when I was asked if I was OK with wiping it (I said yes I as it was blank).

I had to sleep my computer during the wiping, and now I can't do anything with my dive.

When I put it into my computer:

When I click format disk:

In short, the disk never reformats (I get an error message letting me know that Windows was unable to format the drive). Whats going on, and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

If you have a Linux live media, use it to reformat the USB flash drive using GParted or other similar software.

Or you could try formatting your drive through cmd. Here is a nice tutorial to do so.

http://www.ehow.com/how_5937471_format-usb-flash-drive-dos.html

A summary of the steps you might use, based on the eHow article linked above:

• Open a command shell and launch diskpart.
• Type "list disk".
• Find the disk number for the one you want to format and type "select disk x" (replace x with disk number - e.g., "select disk 5").
• Type "clean". This will remove all formatting and partition information from the thumb drive.
• Type "create partition primary".
• Type "exit" to close diskpart.

At this point, you can probably try again the usual methods of formatting - either using the format command in the shell or using Windows Explorer.