Trouble with USB Drive (Persistent Homedir Creation froze)

Hello again,

I finally got my hands on a USB Drive, and figured I'd create a persistent homedir for knoppix. So, I loaded knoppix, got it working, and started up the persistent homedir wizard. I got to the point where it began to make the homedir... It went up to about 96%, then froze. I waited for about half an hour, then decided to take out the drive. When I rebooted, I couldn't load from the USB drive, so I loaded from knoppix. However, I couldn't mount the drive. When I tried, it said: "error: I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified). So, I tried booting into Windows and reformatting the drive. Got an error there, too... It said something to the extent of: "Could not format the drive, error in ioctl call", nor could I access the drive with windows...

So, now I have an inaccessable USB Drive, and am trying to format it or change it so that I am able to access it in some way. From what I understand, it was formatted into a RAW partition, which is why I can't access it now. Is there something in Knoppix or a program in Windows I could use to fix this?

Thanks,
illu45

EDIT: Tried making a new partition table on the USB Drive with Qtparted... It says: "It Was Not Possible To Make a New Partition Table"

Have you tried using Windows Disk Manager? Just Right-Click on the "My Computer" icon and select manage. From there go to the disks and select you USB pen and try to format it from there. Hopefully it'll work.

These drives can be strange beasts as there are several _standards_ (oxymoron!) to the information contained in the boot sector.

I find it best to just clean and repartition any drive I purchase before use. This of course can be a problem, as you have learned, as some partition editors will just not understand what they are dealing with. Don't forget that you need to be _root_ in order to save any changes from a GNU/Linux system and just keep trying different editors (from any os) until you find one that works with your drive.