Re: details on howto re-format a USB flash drive?

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--
Ted Zieglar
"A fool and his data are soon parted."

"David H. Cook" <David.Hubert.Cook@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1142264859.271659.245830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

My USB flash-drive (which happens to be a Lexar 128-MB jump-drive)
either got
accidently partially re-formated by a co-worker or else it has just
developed
'bad-blocks'. I'm not sure which.

So, now the questions relate to how, if possible, to re-format the
drive.

e.g. should I choose 'FAT32' or just 'FAT'?

I tried on Win-XP to format it (as FAT32). It formatted part way for a
few seconds,
then 'bombed out'. So, do I need to include 'size' info when I format
it? Or, did it
bomb-out because of the format-type that I chose?

I also can NOT rule out the possibility that the drive became 'damaged'
in some way.
Maybe there is size-info on the drive, but maybe a portion of the drive
further in
now has 'bad blocks'??

The current symptoms, when I insert it into various computers (all of
which ONCE
knew how to access it just fine), now recognize it as a 'flash-drive'
and appear
to mount it ok. But, when I try to access it, they all now give the
same
symptom: I typically get a 'Windows - delayed write failed' msg after
about 30
seconds. Before that, the drive mounts and a drive-letter gets
assigned ok.
It says 'removeable drive', which is correct. When I then try to
explicitly access
that drive, after a long timeout, I get a popup window, saying:

F:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and
unreadable.

Ok. So, is re-formatting the right idea? If so, can someone point me
to a detailed
explanation of howto properly re-format it?

TIA...

Dave


.

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