Problem with 8gb Thumb Drive

[StupidSpoge]

Hi, i'm not new here... But i forgot my old account's name. Whatever...

I Fix windows computers. So I use an 8gb thumb drive with an iso restored onto it. (the way you do it with with Disk Utility). It has fixes to some basic windows problems. Here is the problem: it got kinda messed up, and when I hook it up to my Mac to swap the images that are on it and stuff, Finder freezes up and wont relaunch untill i pull the thumb drive out. Then my computer yells at me. I just want to give it a clean formatting to work like a regular thumb drive again, (not a boot disk) but when i get as far as erasing it in Disk Utility, a message comes up saying "Error, Failed to unmount" or something very similar.

How can i just... format it to be a regular thumb drive again? I dont need any data from it. I have 10.4.11 if that helps at all.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

don't ever format a usb flash drive! they use a special file system, to "format" it, just delete all the files on it and thats it. but dont format it or else you lose the special format of usb flash drives.

 

[StupidSpoge]

I deleted all the files in finder, but it still says that there is disk space being used. Hmmm... I try a few more things.

 

[StupidSpoge]

I DID IT!!!
believe it or not... windows fixed it...
I put it into my windows pc, which then reformatted it to FAT32

 

[CWallace]

don't ever format a usb flash drive! they use a special file system, to "format" it, just delete all the files on it and thats it. but dont format it or else you lose the special format of usb flash drives.

I've happily formatted my flash drives with FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS. I have not yet tried HFS+, but only because I need compatibility with Windows (so I use FAT32).