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I have this brand new flash drive "geek squad" brand that is unusable, I've tried to format it on windows and mac without luck (I just cannot do it neither using the terminal nor via GUI) so I was trying to use a low level formating tool but it won't appear there to be formatted, any other ideas? besides going and try to get my money back.

EDIT

I noticed it has some sort of U3 program installed, don't know how that might help

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I managed to format a belligerent partition on a friend's flash drive. Normal methods would not work because as far as the (Windows) OS knew, it was an unwritable CDFS CD-ROM partition:

These tools allowed me to remove the CDFS partition:

  1. USBDeview to see flash vendor ID, this can be found http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usbdeview.zip
  2. If your flash is SMI chip, you need SMI UFD utility, which can be found http://ftp.usboffice.kr/files/SMI_UFD_Utility.zip
  3. If your flash is USBEST chip, you need UCDexec.exe, which is http://ftp.usboffice.kr/files/UCDExec.exe

Here is little forum about it http://blog.usboffice.kr/?p=146

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That's what you get for buying anything associated with The Geek Squad. My advice is to return it for a new one or a refund.

If you bought a new car and it had problems, would you try to fix it yourself or would you take it back to the dealer?

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Might just be a bad one if you can't get it to format with Disk Utility on Mac. Also see if you can rewrite the master boot record for it.

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  • how can I see that?
    – Proxify
    Oct 27, 2010 at 6:17
  • Open disk utility, see if the drive even shows up on the left. If it does, click on it, and look in the right pane for a Partition tab. That's all I can remember from memory. Good luck.
    – wag2639
    Oct 27, 2010 at 7:02

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