Formatted USB drive as "Free space" and now isn't found

[rodnet]

Hi,

I've been having difficulties using my USB stick on windows computers, even though I formatted it as FAT (ed. I realized I had to use the Windows partition sceme and have resolved this issue). I've tried lots of things and admit that I got fed up and saw a new option today "format as free space" in disk utility.

Now the drive isn't recognized as being present at all in Disk Utility, /Volumes, and is not showing up with "diskutil list" in Terminal.

I mainly want to know if it's possible to get the system to recognize that a drive is plugged in so I can reformat it with ANY filesystem.

Dumb move on my part. I'm pretty green to the underworkings of the mac.

Appreciate any advice!
Thanks

 

[larkost]

"free space" means that that portion of the drive does not have any filesystem on it, and thus is not useable anywhere. Disk Utility probably sees the drive, but since there are no volumes on it you are not seeing what you expect.