<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Woody Shea <<a href="mailto:woody@izar-shea.com">woody@izar-shea.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> First, thank you for the reply.</blockquote><div>sure dude, youre welcome! I know the feeling... its great when other people help me, so i'm just trying to return the favor to the general community. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I don't think GParted reads the disk right. It reports that the disk is 251MiB and, when I try to format, it core-dumps. </blockquote><div> Seeing that GParted doesn't fare well, there's obviously something bigger going on here... Cuz Gparted usually doesn't give troubles. you might want to try Hiren's Boot Cd (9.8) to partition ur drive. It has a bunch of cool tools in it, so its good to keep it handy: <a href="http://www.kaldata.net/modules.php?modid=1&action=show&id=579">http://www.kaldata.net/modules.php?modid=1&action=show&id=579</a> <a href="http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=hiren">http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=hiren</a> Now, being an Electrical Engineer, here's what i think is going on: its possible your drive doesnt support sectors smaller than 2048 cuz it doesnt have enough memory addressing space... basically since you want to increase the number of sectors to 4 times what it'd be with 2048, it cant provide each sector with a unique address to store and retrieve data. it basically has to do with the memory controller.... :( if you dont understand what i mean, then think of a 9 digit phone number. if the telephone company (or memory controller) supports only 9 digit phone numbers, then there is no room for expansion in case more than 10 to the power 9 phone numbers are ever required, cuz each number maps to a unique phone line to a unique house (unique memory sector). so you cant do anything abt it if thats the case :( cuz the issue is with hardware support. but try it with hiren's boot cd anyways, and if Acronis Disk Director or the other partition manager (forgot its name, but its next to it in the menu.. "partition manager/editor" maybe??) works then great!! format to Fat32 of course.. or maybe Ubuntu's USB creator uses Fat16 :s </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I'm fairly certain that I can't format to 512, so... Can I boot Linux on it? </blockquote></div>If you cant set the sector size to 512 then i dont think you will be able to use your flash drive.. im really sorry. :( there might be hope yet, im no expert! btw 4 gig flash drives are getting pretty reasonable these days.. i bought a 16gb flash drive (Kingston Data Traveler... very reputable), including shipping for 25 US dollars off Woot.com half a year back! :) Try <a href="http://newegg.com">newegg.com</a> or <a href="http://tigerdirect.com">tigerdirect.com</a> or <a href="http://compusa.com">compusa.com</a> or frys if you're in the USA Regards Fez