if a usb pen drive has 64349 cylinders, is it damaged?

Posted by Andrew S on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Andrew S
Published on 2010-08-08T08:56:39Z Indexed on 2010/12/27 12:55 UTC
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I have a 4Gb USB pen drive that I'm trying to format with FAT32.

When I run fdisk, it gives me this message:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 64349. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

I've tried deleting the partition table, creating new partitions, etc, but they never work. Sometimes I can write to the drive the first time I use it after formatting it, but then it becomes read-only in both Windows and Linux.

I've tried this on multiple computers.

Am I doing something wrong, or is the drive reporting an incorrect number of cylinders? Is the drive itself likely to be corrupted, and is there anyway to fix this under Windows Vista or Linux?

Thanks

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