Formatting a RAW drive - NO PARTITION

[SpartanEngineer]

I need help!
I have a 32 GB USB drive that I had been using for some time.
Recently, while using the drive, my computer glitched out, forcing me to force re-start it.
When I turned my computer back on, the computer said that my drive needs to be formatted first in order to use it.
I thus gave myself a crash-course on USB Drive repair, and learned following facts about the problem:
1. The drive is now in RAW
2. There is no physical damage (according to gsmartcontrol-0.8.7)
3. According to testdisk-7.0, there is NO PARTITION. None at all, even after a deep search

I've given up trying to recover my data (there wasn't much in it anyway as I was only doing a transfer.) I tried unplugging to drive and clicking "Yes" when the computer asked me to format it.
The formatting window panel popped up, and I clicked format.
And nothing happened. The progress bar did not budge.
I then tried to format it using the cmd. Similarly, the format begins, but it does not progress beyond 0%.

Can somebody please help?!?!! What on earth is happening?
Please also note that I have absolutely no idea what this is all about. I'm just trying to sound smart by listing everything that sounds important. Please help me!

UPDATE: I tried to re-format my flash drive on a much gruntier gaming computer. After about thirty minutes of running, it simply claimed that windows was unable to format the drive. It seems that normal formatting methods does not seem to work

UPDATE: The flash drive seems to be made by Microsoft, as it has that name stamped on it. I cannot see any other brand names on the flash drive. Unfortunately, my meager research revealed that Microsoft has not released an external formatting device for me to use. I am really stumped as to what to do now.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, SpartanEngineer.

You should give yourself some credit, you've done pretty well with the info and the testing part. When it says that the partition is RAW, that means that it's lacking a file system such as FAT32, NTFS, exFAT etc. (used by Windows for example). When there's no file system, the OS (operating system, which is Windows in this case) is not able to "recognize" the data on the storage device.
I'd suggest that you check Disk Management and if the USB flash drive is recognized there as well. Here's how to open it: How to access Disk Management in Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8 to manage hard drives. If it is recognized you could try this: click on the partition with the right mouse button -> select "delete volume" -> it should show up as unallocated space after that -> click with the right mouse button again and select "new simple volume" -> follow the wizard's steps and if everything's OK it should be formatted and ready to go. If that doesn't help, I'd recommend that you try some of the formatting tools which some of the manufacturers offer for their devices and see if one of them works for you.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[SpartanEngineer]

Dear Boogieman_WD

Thank you for your help! Unfortunately, I am still stuck.
I did go to the disk management before, and that's where I saw that the drive is now in RAW.
The drive is indeed recognized, and naturally is filled by a single, 100%-space-filling primary partition. When I right click it, the options to:
"Mark partition as active"
"Extend Volume"
"Shrink Volume"
"Delete Volume"
Are disabled. Greyed out and not clickable.

I think something more complicated is actually going on....

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hmm this sounds a bit unfortunate. I'd recommend that you try the flash drive with another computer to see if you're able to format it by using any of the mentioned methods: diskpart, Disk Management, or try some of the other manufacturer's formatting tools to see if you have any luck. The unpleasant news here is that if nothing works for you - there's a possibility that the flash drive might have failed already. 🙁

 

[jsmithepa]

I had a similar prob, found out it's partitioned as GPT, I followed web's procedure converting GPT to MBR partition using DISKPART, it fixed my prob. DISKPART is dangerous, follow procedure by the letter, do not skip anything.