Trouble with USB Drive (Persistent Homedir Creation froze)

[illu45]

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"

[Medieval Anubis]

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.

[nad]

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.