I've had this problem for a while now, but only for one of my thumb drives:

I use many different computers every day, so I keep some of my stuff on a 1 GB thumb drive. I have it formatted to FAT32, since apparently it's the most compatible format. But it never works on any XP computer. It always works on all other computers I use (Vista, Snow Leopard, Ubuntu on a (different) flash drive), but never on any XP machine.

On a computer running XP, it just shows up as a "Removable disk." When I try to open it up, it tells me it's not formatted and asks me if I want to format it, but then I just pull it out and stick it on a different computer and it works fine. I've tried formatting it with each of the OSes I've used, even the XP ones that think it's not formatted, but it never works. (When I try formatting it in XP it gives me an error saying something went wrong with the format.) I also tried using it in NTFS, FAT16, and Mac Journaled, but obviously there were compatibility issues.

Apparently there are other people who had this issue with their thumb drives, and only with XP (you can find them on Google). Just thought I'd post here too, in case anyone found a fix for this.

My thumb drive is a 1 GB Kingston DataTraveler, and I've used it successfully on Vista, 7, Snow Leopard, Leopard, Tiger, and Ubuntu (but never XP).

Did you try reinstalling the USB drivers for Windows XP?

Nope, they're school comps.

And all my other thumb drives work, for some reason (a 4 GB Kingston DataTraveler, for example).

The same problem happens at my school, but the problem is usually resolved by using a different USB port. Try doing that.

Sounds like a driver issue to me indeed. Chances are that there's nothing you could do with the flash drive itself to prevent that from happening.

Not sure if this is relevant, but my friend and I were messing with a partitioned thumb drive that had an OS installed on it. We opened it up in Ubuntu and manually deleted ALL the partitions because we wanted all the space back. It worked fine in Ubuntu, but when we brought it to my XP netbook, it would not format! We brought it back to Ubuntu, where it worked, and manually created a new partition and formated it there as FAT, brought it to XP, formatted into FAT32.

Not sure if that helps.

I doubt it's relevant in this case, but it's an excellent example of how much more powerful Linux is for dealing with low-level manipulation of disks and partitions and file systems.

Yeah, I fixed a different thumb drive with Ubuntu. It's pretty awesome

I'll try reinstalling the driver if I can, then.

That might help, but the problem is trying to use the device on locked-down school computers on which he can't install drivers.

I can't reinstall the USB drivers, but it might be worth mentioning that this particular thumb drive is a lot slower than all my other thumb drives on computers where it actually works. It takes at least ten times as long for it to eject from a Mac, for instance, and on Windows Vista and Ubuntu, transferring data and running programs from the thumb drive is extremely laggy.

I hope my thumb drive's not corrupted

I hate to say it, but it sounds like the wear-leveling and bad-sector-circumvention mechanisms are working full-tilt. You should take the data off of it ASAP, if possible.

Slightly off-topic, but how much time on average would a flash drive take to wear out?

The usual figure bandied about is 100,000 write cycles for modern flash memory; I'm not sure how reliable that figure is, but it's probably in the right order of magnitude, I'd say. Of course, you could have a defective Flash chip with a much lower limit, or a slightly better one with a higher limit.

Can you translate that into, say, hours of use?

I've had to update XP systems to include more USB drivers for FlashDrives, card-readers, etc. before I could get some devices to fully work. Even then, some drivers will still treat devices as if they're plugged into USB 1.1 ports, instead of 2.0. (which means a decrease in read / write speeds)

FlashDrives do have finite write cycles. I can't really estimate what that would be, since it's going to depend on the quality of the device itself, when it was produced, and possibly other factors. Flash is a technology that's still improving. Flash devices from years ago may not have been produced with as much longevity in mind as modern Flash devices are.

I think anyone's best bet is to use a portable card-reader, paired with replaceable SD cards. You can buy card-readers that look and function like FlashDrives. When your card wears down, it's simple to replace it with another while still having your reader intact.

I've done that, but after about a month of use the SD card began losing data. If you make frequent backups it would be fine, but only if you can afford to buy SD cards like potato chips.

Ah yes, that's always a good choice. Another thing I like to do with SD cards is keep them in laptops and netbooks as semi-permanent drives and/or storage of backups.

Yikes, guess I should back up for once then...