USB thumb drive dead!?!!

[javabear90]

So my friend wanted me to erase his thumb drive. I thought "ok, no problem" So i format it and in the middle of formating/partioning i get an unknown error. Upon further investigation, he had a secret encrypted partition. I need to get rid of it so I can have the full 1 gb of space. I tried portioning, formating and everything with disk utility. Then I used windows box and did that. Then I used a special Maxtor software thing. The software said it worked and that it formated the drive, however it did not mount and was just as it was before. HELP! I would like to restore the drive to the original fresh state by any means possible.

 

[alex_ant]

I think all USB drives come FAT-formatted. I don't think Disk Utility is capable of creating FAT filesystems. Are you sure you can't just plug the thing into a PC running Windows, make one big partition on it and put a FAT filesystem on that partition? That should be all there is to it...

 

[javabear90]

no, i tried that, it does not work. My computer or what ever does not detect it. Anyway I can't format the thing with ANY format. they give me an error or it does not work. I tried HFS, Unix, NTFS, Fat 16, Fat 32. They all don't work. I even used Maxtor Max Blast 3. I need like a force format thing.