Formatting a Usb drive to NTFS

[spark29]

My dad bought a chinese flash drive off ebay for christmas...and I'm trying to format it to NTFS so I can put files over 4 gb on it. I changed the option in the device manager to optimize for performance and then attempted to format the drive to NTFS. It seems like it goes through the process, then once it's finished, says, "Windows was unable to complete the format." I can format it back to fat32, so I guess the drive isn't corrupted or anything, but I'm not sure what's wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[badge]

I also had a drive that would fail to format from fat32 to NTFS. All my other drives formatted to NTFS fine. Do not know why the one would not cooperate? FYI, if you plan on using a USB Flash drive for Vista Readyboost, most definately use one that will format to NTFS. The drive performs much faster formatted to NTFS.

http://www.ntfs.com/quest22.htm

 

[spark29]

That doesn't really answer my question. I followed that same procedure, but when I actually tried to format it gave me an error. PS, the drive is 8gb, if that has anything to do with it. In the format dialog box it recognizes the drive as 7.81 gb.

 

[badge]

The link I gave is THE procedure to format any usb flash drive from fat32 to NTFS. If your particular drive will not format to NTFS following the proper procedure, for whatever reason the drive is apparently limited in it's capability of supporting a NTFS format.

 

[badge]

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1676&page=8

 

[spark29]

I see. I suppose that's the problem with paying 20 dollars for an 8gb flash drive? Thanks.

 

[badge]

I'm sure there is a technical reason why the drive won't run NTFS. I would like to know why too?

 

[gone fishin']

I have heard a rumor that somw of the higher capicity USB devices are "doctored "to make the drive act like it is a larger size drive,I wonder if you got one of those, at one time there was a thing listd in Ebay about which rives ere made over, maybe you could check it out

 

[nalooti]

try to delete the partition, recreate one and then format

 

[gone fishin']

I looked at my 1 GIG in properties and it shows 1,034,911,744 bytes with 986MB available,check your properties and see if the whole 8 GIG is there, and you have 7.81 available, maybe you lost a little space for the FAT tables and partitioning

 

[guignol]

I can confirm the rumor about "doctored" USB flash drives made in China. I bought a 32GB flash drive by JJ Media on ebay early January. I never was able to store more than 4GB of data on it (beyond this point some old files mysteriously disappeared when new files were copied). I also was not able to format it with NTFS (same problem as described above: it looks OK until the end...).

I just opened the drive and found a unique 4GB chip inside it .

 

[cranbers]

Are you using the control panel-administartor tools - computer management - storage - disk management to do the format? Ntfs has been around for a long time, so I doubt it has anything ot do with the size of it.