To BC, are you saying this would not work?
Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying... or more precisely, I'm saying something like that wouldn't work under normal circumstances. I just tried with all of the flash drives I have available (6, with 5 different brands). Every single one of them has the "Delete Volume" option disabled on the right-click menu.
Don't know if an MP3 USB is different but i assume not.
Clearly there is something exceptional about your computers configuration or the flash drive you used, since not a single one of mine even has that option enabled. My MP3 player doesn't even show up as a drive, it's some weird esoteric thing (but not nearly as bad as the iPod, thankfully).
Fortunately, the limitation is purely "voluntary" in that the devices have a bit set to indicate they are removable; as long as that bit is set by the device, windows will treat it exactly as it would a floppy disk; (go ahead and try to partition a floppy disk, it's physically impossible). Of course, some flash drives will actually appear as two drives, often a CD-ROM drive to enable autoplay for the U3 management stuff) as well as the normal drive. In this case the drive is actually a composite device (as far as the computer is concerned) that exposes two devices.
Normally, a format would be all that is necessary when the file system reverts to RAW. On the other hand, however, through the 15 or so flash drives I've ever had, the only time I've ever had them get RAW filesystems was after it failed miserably. (I had one start being detected as a tablet soon afterwards) this is a direct result of corruption and failure of the various cells in the device itself; I can only imagine that this is the case here especially with regards to the mysterious "cannot determine number of sectors" error. Of course, assuming they somehow have this option to remove the partition they could try that and recreate it again. If the option is not available, the tool linked on
this page may prove useful for toggling the bit as well as possibly as a method of formatting.
Another option would be to try it on another computer; I've seen this happen for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes it will mysteriously show up as RAW on one computer and properly on another (and no, the former PC was not a win9x machine trying to access an NTFS flash drive)
