Problem with usb Flash memory

Hi everybody,

One of my friends called me to check his usb flash memory as he was having problems opening a word document in his memory stick. When I checked it, I found the document was corrupted. When I went to command prompt and checked the usb drive with 'chkdsk' , it showed me some lost chains and gave me the option to convert those lost chains into files. After I chosed to convert them into files, it seemed to work (did not generate any error messege and returned to command prompt). But now I can't even access the flash memory. I tried to format it both from windows (gives a msg. that windows was unable to format the drive) and command prompt (says that an unspecified error occured) without any success.

Is there any way I can make the memory stick usable again?

Thanks.

im sure the site for the company who makes it will have a format utility. You probably just formatted it wrong when you used the command prompt on it.

Thanks for your reply. The brand is creative muvo 64 (Sorry, I should've given this info in the first place). I looked at creative's website but couldn't fine anything

call them or email tech support.

you could also download a version of knoppix or mandrake move (go with mandrake move if you're a n00b to linux) and you can format it under there. Linux has great support for flash devices in their later kernels. I just think that the command prompt knew that it was a drive, it just didn't know what type and probably formatted it to fat12 or some crap.

What Not to Do (what you did)

How To Format MUVO

Thanks for the links major_small. That was very helpful. I'll post the outcome if its fixed.