Problem in formatting pen drive

Trouble:

We have received many problems mentioning that they are not able to format their pen drives. Some of them have written that the pen drive capacity displayed is not correct.



When they try to format the pen drive, Windows Shows error "Can not format the pen drive". There can be more than one reasons behind such problems, some of the common problems are:




1. Virus or trojan infection.

2. Corrupted flash chips on the pen drive (hardware fault)

3. Fake pen drives ! (Many such drives are there in the markets, beware)



Lets see what to do to fix the issues.

Fix:



Virus or trojan infections:




Virus or trojans can run some process that keeps running in background. This not only harms the computer, but also prevents the pen drive from formatting as it shows that the drive is in use. Remove and re-insert the pen drive, don’t double click on drive and cancel autorun operations if it starts automatically. Run a virus scan on pen drive, this will help fix the issue. Now format the pen drive.



Always take precautions while using pen drives on other computers. See the some of our posts below on protecting your pen drive from viruses:

Protect your computer from virus in pen drives
Autorun.inf eater to remove autorun.inf related virus
General safety tips against virus and trojans


Corrupted flash chips on pen drive:




If the pen drive is not detected at all, or shows a less capacity, then there are high chances that its a chip corruption. Flash chips are the actual hardware components that save the data. A physical or electrical or electromagnetic damage to these chips make the pen drive faulty. This can happen because of voltage fluctuations and faulty USB ports. In such case, get the flash drive replaced if its under warranty as it can not be fixed otherwise.



Fake pen drives:




Sounds a bit un-believable but true. There are a lot of pen drives in the market which are of very cheap quality which are fake copies of some known brands. Beware of such pen-drives. Always purchase pen-drives or memory-cards from a reliable source with bill and warranty to avoid any mess later.



We hope the information provided above will help.