Formatting a Flash Drive?

jwills

I have a 2GB flash drive which i have been using to store some information on. One day when i plugged it into a computer all my info. was gone and it was asking me if i wanted to format it. I thought it might have been something wrong w/the PC itself, but nope, i got the same thing on other PC's. Anyway can you format a flash drive, and if so what file system. Fat32? That was the only choice it gave me to format with.

Thanks

JDMurray

You can format, defrag, and run disk recovery and repair utilities on USB flash drives (thumb drives, MP3 players, portable media players, etc.). The only trick is you need to use software utilities that supports removable media drives.

For Windows, FAT32 is the only reasonable file system to put on a flash drive. The only problem I've run into with FAT32 is the max file size is only 4GB. That's not enough a for a full DVD image. I don't know what the max file size of the Apple HFS+ file system used on Apple-based USB flash drives (iPod).

KGhaleon

I've got a Corsair 8GB Flash voyager GT drive partitioned with FAT32 and I haven't had too many issues with it. I back the data up about once a week using NTbackup.exe, since the file generally isn't very large.

KG

jwills

Thanks, I'm going to give it a try.