any way to format a usb stick?

the 512 usb stick i bought made by ativa came with some crap software. i deleted it off the stick but it keeps popping back, is there anyway to format a usb stick?

 

yeah, just open 'my computer' right click on the usb drive and select 'format'.

 

i did that but this u3 crap that i guess helps me manage whats on the drive keeps popping up everytime i put it in, its sometihng that came with the drive. i bought a 512 stick and got 482 mbs

 

okay i got rid of all the crap on it and its just a blank drive now but it still has only 486 mb when it says 512 on the package. is there anyway to get it up to 512?

 

Are you sure you deleted the hidden partittion that holds the U3 software.
You should use this: http://www.u3.com/uninstall/

Also note that it won't be exactly 512MB. It will be slightly less, because of the way they calculate a megabyte ie 10^6 instead of 1024^3

 

I imagine that the small auto run partition accounts for some of the claimed drive space (4mb or so) and formatting will take some as well. Since you emptied the auto run (u3) partition is it still showing up as a cd drive? Are you able to load your own software in this partition (like pstart for example?)

Let me know...

 

JC

 

A long shot. Try reformatting the USB drive using FAT16 instead of FAT?

There' some kind of cluster limit on the old FAT system, and you may have run into that.

That or you have a possibly counterfeit USB drive made by one of those Chinese pirates.

 

i used that u3 install program so now im at 486 mbs totaly instead of 482. but it says 509,600,000 bytes. dunno just looking at that picture the guy posted and he circled the amount of bytes. should i go by that? 509 mbs now?

 

Sounds right, 512 MB before format, 482 MB afterwards