USB formatting

Homework? Better to teach you how to fish than to just give you some fish...

Open a command prompt window and type "format /?". Adding "/?" to any command will tell you how it works.

...although "compression rate" and "8-32Kbps" seem non-sequitur in this context.

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If I had a boat, rod and reel, bait, etc. then you would be right. But for a 60 yo novice, no way. The USB flash drive is to put in a Kia auto, and the manual states it has to have that formatting. Once formatted, the plan to is to put music on it in WMA files, so that it will work the stereo.

I still don't get the "compression rate of 8-32 Kbps" requirement - perhaps it's saying that the flash drive need to be able to transfer data at that speed? If so, any flash drive should be capable of that, it's not dependent on how you format the drive.

As for the rest of it, any flash drive you buy should already come formatted that way. Have you actually tried the drive to see if it works?

Yes, it works in my computer, but not in the car. I get a message : USB not found.

Also, the auto manual stated the flash drive had to be formatted in this manner for it to be recognized.

We'll need to see how the drive is formatted. Here's how to do it:

Plug the drive into your computer and use Start -> Computer to view the drive and see what drive letter it is.

Then open a command prompt window by clicking "Start" and typing "cmd" followed by the enter key.

Type "chkdsk" followed by a space and the drive letter and a colon (i.e., "D:").

Right-click the mouse button in the window and select "Mark", then use the left mouse button to drag-select the output of Chkdsk to highlight it, then click the right mouse button to copy it to the paste buffer, then paste it into a reply post so we can see what it says.

G:\>chkdsk g:
The type of the file system is FAT32.
The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk
might report errors when no corruption is present.
Volume Serial Number is CC3A-E19F
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

4,000,284,672 bytes total disk space.
4,000,251,904 bytes available on disk.

32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
122,079 total allocation units on disk.
122,078 allocation units available on disk.

OK, so chkdsk is telling you that the cluster (the "allocation unit") size is 32K, and that's doubtless your problem.

Plug the drive into your computer, open a command prompt window, and type the following command (WARNING - it will DESTROY ALL THE DATA on the drive, so make sure you have another copy of it before proceeding).

format G: /FS:FAT32 /A:2048

The above command assumes that the drive letter is "G:" as shown in your chkdsk output, if the drive has a different drive letter then substitute it for "G:" in the command.

Once you've done that copy some files to the drive and try it in your car.

Thanks. That formatted the flash drive so that the car recognized it. But now I still have to figure out how to copy music from either my itunes acct or from the computer itself to the flash drive, in WMA files. Currently the car says USB disk empty, even though I've copied music to it. In itunes, to export, it only lists save types as text, W3U, or XML file format.

Best answer selected by glk78523.