Hello, I don't know how this happened but I was given a thumb drive some while back that had been read read only and unformattable. The partition type as reported by windows was raw. It had been in a 7 box that had AVG standard 2012 on it and somehow AVG apparently made it in to a recovery drive, in doing so the user could not reformat it which is how I got it. What I did was loaded up a Linux virtual machine, ran fdisk on it, wiped the partition, recreated it, the partition showed up under Linux fdisk as HPFS/NTFS/Xfat the latter I had not heard of, I then disconnected and reconnected to the host box, and formatted. It works fine now. In case anyone else has seen this hope this helps. Dave.