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Drive Cleaner "windows was unable to complete the formatting"

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Hi, I'm using Acronis True Image 2019 perpetual version having bought this upgrade in March 2019 from an earlier version.

I'm very disappointed that technical support no longer offers support even though I've had this for under as year. Ridiculous.

Anyway, I cleaned a USB stick for the first time and used the default settings at the top of the list of choices.

I now get "windows was unable to complete the formatting" when I try to use the stick. Within that "cannot determine the number of sectors on this volume format failed"

Tried this n.b. the stick was drive h obviously:

C:\Users\peter>format h:/fs:ntfs
Insert new disk for drive H:
and press ENTER when ready...
The type of the file system is RAW.
The new file system is NTFS.
Verifying 0.0 Bytes
Cannot determine the number of sectors on this volume.
Format failed.

Any suggestions? Thanks very much.

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Ashton, what exactly are you wanting to do here?

What size of USB stick are you dealing with?

What will the USB stick be used for?

Acronis Drive Cleanser is one of the less useful utilities provided with ATI and is really intended for when you are wanting to dispose of disk drives and ensure that no sensitive user data remains on the drive.  As such, the process can take many, many hours if using multiple passes to 'clean' the drive using various methods etc.

USB sticks are normally logical devices using chips rather than a spinning disk drive and therefore do not need to use tools like Drive Cleanser (sledge-hammer to crack a nut).

To clean a USB stick, you can use the following native commands from an Administrator Command prompt window (or Powershell).

Preparing USB drive for use by Acronis using Diskpart
diskpart
list disk   (to identify USB drive, i.e. 3)
select disk 3
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit