USB Stick - Formatting Issues

Dark Nova Gamer · 14 Apr 2010

Bill2 said:

Hmmm...bad drive, bad sector. Do a chkdsk.

Chkdsk has come back clean.

Bill2 · 14 Apr 2010

The only thing i can think of now is to use a 3rd party app like Paragon partition manager or Partition wizard to format the drive.

As a side note, do you have "Optimize for Performance" enabled under "Policies" in the drive's properties? Am sure you already do, but just to confirm.

Dark Nova Gamer · 14 Apr 2010

Bill2 said:

The only thing i can think of now is to use a 3rd party app like Paragon partition manager or Partition wizard to format the drive.

As a side note, do you have "Optimize for Performance" enabled under "Policies" in the drive's properties? Am sure you already do, but just to confirm.

Yes, have tried without it as well so no real difference there. I fear it is the drive itself since I have issues formatting it in both Windows and OS X alike.

Bill2 · 14 Apr 2010

Agreed. Best not to spend too much time on it. The shelf life of most such things is appallingly low and they arent cheap either.

Dark Nova Gamer · 14 Apr 2010

Bill2 said:

Agreed. Best not to spend too much time on it. The shelf life of most such things is appallingly low and they arent cheap either.

Well, it still has a use so I wont scrap it. Got it as a gift from a close friend.

Suppose I'll need to dip in and spend a bit for an 8GB one, since thats all I really need for what I want to do.

Thanks anyways.

biergeliebter · 24 Jun 2011

CommonTater said:

Actually these flash drives are pretty much designed to be used with FAT32 which is how they almost all come out of the factory.

In normal use there should be no reason to ever format a flash drive. Even on the off chance you get an OS that doesn't understand FAT32, you should only ever have to do a format on it once.

My suggestion is that you format it to FAT32 and leave it be.

The reason for using other than FAT32 is to be able to handle a file larger than 4 GB. If using TrueCrypt to create a large encrypted folder or encrypt the whole drive, or if you want to put a couple 5 and 6 GB movie files on there to take with you on a flight, it has to be formatted as NTFS or exFAT. FAT32 can only handle file sizes up to 4 GB.