A magazine arrived at a doctor's office where my wife works. It's a medical pro rag (a.k.a. a drug sales promo) that included a small flash drive that, when connected, it uses your web connection to start a flash-type video describing the wonders of some overpriced drug that ends one symptom and creates three others... Thus, the drive actually contains just a 42k file that is an autorun of a weblink.

It shows up in XP Media Ctr as a CD Rom, not a hard drive. As such, it offers no format option to blank it or to even tell what its capacity is (tho I suspect its as tiny as they come).

Any clue how to get it properly recognized as a flash drive, and then to blank it?

Hello jwramc!

I've never encountered this "problem" before, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

Click on Start --> Run and type diskmgmt.msc and press enter. Find the drive that belongs to the Flash Drive and Right-click on it. See if it gives you a Format option. If not, let me know what options it does give you.

BTW, if you do successfully format it, I'm curious to know how large the Flash Drive is.

Open, Explore, Change Drive Letter/Path, Properties, Help.

Ok. I wish I could get to my disk management right now, but I'm at school and that's restricted.

Go to Start --> Run and type cmd and press enter.

type format /x x:\ and press enter

(Replace the red x with the letter of your Flash Drive)

Let me know if that works

Invalid drive specification ....


GRR!

Take the drive out. Open My computer and look at all your drives. Make a mental note of how it looks.

Now insert the drive. Do you see just one drive, a CD drive, appear. Or do you actually see 2?

Or...do you already see all kinds of other drives, like F, G, H, I...possibly pointing to a 6 in 1 media reader or something?

A- floppy
B- Zip100
C,D,G- HDDs
E,F- DVD-ROMs
H thru L- card readers

Adding the flash drive only adds M.