4Gb USB drive become inoperable after formatting for bootflash install
 

New to this distro, and also USB booting.My flash drive has stopped being recognised by puppy, mint 10 & ubuntu 11.04. I believe it has been formatted to ext2-4, can't quite remember. Have also tried formatting it with Win7 to no avail. Please help me get my son's flash drive back from the dead, lost or just imprisoned.

You can try geparted to format it .
As you know geparted come as live cd

This should work in Windows 7 as it works in Windows Vista.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...mat-Tool.shtml

Gparted in any Linux Distro works for me.

Post athat is a Lower case L after -

with USB drive plugged in while in Puppy. If in Ubuntu the command is

The above commands should show what is going on with USB drive while connected to computer.
If fdisk -l does not show your drive. Something is physically wrong with either usb port for the usb drive itself.

rokytnji is right try that first to see what it says.

Remember that usb flash memories can be very slow devices so them must be given time to respond. several seconds at least 5 seconds or 10 or more.

I would also try these links to programs that may be good at knowing what have happen to that flash mem.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...mat-Tool.shtml

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/restori...key-partition/

If you succeed to tell here so we know that we gave good advice :)