Windows XP forum: USB stick formatting

When it is plugged into your computer, open up My Computer, and find the drive, highlight & right click and see if you can format it there. My USB stick is 128 MB and I could only choose FAT or FAT32 to format; I chose FAT32.
That might work.
Good Luck.

I guess it might be a smartdrive in which case I need to wipe the cdfs partition so that it doesn't have this annoying autorun feature everytime but maybe keep the cdfs partition there for future use (it would have to be writable though otherwise what's the point in having it)?

The thing is that it doesn't have the U3 stamp and it doesn't come bundled with U3 software. I tried their uninstall feature but it doesn't recognise a U3 drive so it can't be.
However for a USB flash drive to have a cdfs as well as a fat32 partition, there must be something going on. Maybe repatitioning it would work?
Because it was a free drive, the cdfs autorun featur loads up a website advertising their site so I'm trying to get rid of that somehow.
Having a read-only cdfs partition with this on is annoyinf when the page oads each time I plug it in and I'd just like it to be a 64Mb drive if possible.

The flash drive is partitioned as
E: cdfs CD drive
F: fat removable media

When I use windows' Computer management it does not pick up drive e:
I tried the HP utility you mentioned and that only picks up the removable drive F:.

Any ideas?

I've turned off the autoplay for the drive in the meantime but that doesn't free up the diskspace or in fact help for other systems so it's just a temporary bodge.

COmes back to the same message.
Are you being sarcastic !

My first inclination would be to use the Disk Management feature in Windows. If the partition is there, Windows really ought to see it. The only other options are that it's not a separate partition, and you're mistaken (which I doubt), or that it's specifically hidden from Windows so you'll always see the promotion (which is likely). In the second case, I'd guess that a different OS like Linux would be able to see it. Try booting from a live CD of Knoppix or Ubuntu and use their disk manager.

that's u3 technology. That's good. You can install antivirus on your stick and you can use it anywhere, which protects it.

You can also have skype..... just go to u3.sandisk.com and you've got it!