Problem with a flash drive
 

While trying to help a friend reformat their laptop, I accidently wiped both their hard drive AND my flash drive (it was plugged in at the time, I wasn't paying attention..). Crap. Windows doesn't know anything about my flash drive now. Doesn't want to format it. It gives me an error that it wasn't able to complete the format right away. I thought maybe why it wasn't formatting is because I'm trying to format it in FAT (the only choice) but I think most of these are NTFS (??). Any help? Can't find anything on the net to help..

Norton System Suite - Disk Doctor got back some 100GB of data for a coworker. It works with both FAT and NTFS.

Flash/Thumb drives are usually FAT32 format. Reason being because if you put it into a Windows98 machine, it won't recognize NTFS (at least newer versions).

What OS is running on the machine, and is your flash drive just a USB device?

One thing that you may need to consider with a clean format is that the machine may be missing USB driver information to maket he flashdrive communicate appropriately. For my Iomega flash drive there have been times that I've had to download the drivers for it before the computer would recognize it and allow me access. Or you just pooched the USB driver for that particular drive because you had it plugged in when the OS installed so now it thinks it's a hard drive instead of removable storage :)