One of my friend's usb drives has got a windows virus on it. He tried removing it using various anti-viruses, but none worked.. he tried formatting it, and it was write-protected. So I plugged it in my FC6, and tried deleting the files off it, but it obviously didn't work since it was write-protected.. So, my questions are,
1) Can I remove the write-protection?
2) Can I format the drive in linux? if so, how?
3) What file system does a usb drive use? (like cds use iso-9660)
4) Is there anything I can do to remove it?

I don't know if I posted in the right forum, but it seemed right.. Please don't flame me if it's wrong..

try clamav, it runs in an xterm or CLI and be sure to update both main & daily virus definitions...

i think there are some GUI frontends that use clamav for a scanning engine but i never used them...

1. you can remount the usb drive:
mount -o remount,rw /dev/hda2 /mnt/usb_drive/

rw means read/write

where /dev/hda2 should be replaced by the usb device and /mnt/usb_drive should be replaced with the usb drives mount point in your filesystem.

2. reformat using the mkfs command in a terminal window. see the man pages for mkfs for details.

3. whatever filesystem you want (almost). with mkfs you can make ext2, ext3, reiserFS, and a couple of others. see the man pages.

4. remove what? the drive, the filesyste, the virus?

In addition to formatting the drive, there are articles on the 'net about using Knoppix to clean up an infected Windoze machine. With fprot maybe - hit google.

There are probably specific distros just for this by now.

Thanks a lot for all the help! I did what bigrigdriver said.. worked wonderfully... I'll get clamav too..
Thanks for the knoppix tip too.. I'll learn how to do that.. Damn useful since most of my friends keep getting windows viruses..