Usb drive difficulties

I have a 512 megabyte, yes MG, usb drive that i was given for free the other day from my brother and i wanted to use it to tranfer a few albums from the pc to the mac or vice versa.

It is formatted to the Fat32 file system yet it is giving me trouble.
I cant seem to delete whats already on there from either machine, the pc says nothing when i try to drag the files to the trash, just the 'no' symble comes up, while the mac tells me it cannot be modified.

It apparently is read only on the mac, and i cant figure out why.

The pc also doesnt want to have anything to do with this drive. It does let me copy whats on there to the desktop but i cant copy anything to it and a message pops up saying the disk-write is protected.

So what gives?

Is there anything on the flash drive you care about? I have a feeling it has some copy protection on it. Have you tried formatting it? In OSX you use the disk utility. Be sure you select FAT which in OSX is FAT32 as both Windows and OSX will both read and write to it.

If it will not let you format it let us know.

there isnt anything i care about on the drive. As far as the disk utility goes, under the erase tab everything is greyed out, including volume format. The format selection isnt greyed out in the raid tab, but im not sure if creating a raid is what i should be doing.

Is there a manual " write protect " type of switch visible anywhere on the outside of the pen drive ?

Cheers ... McBie

whats the correct term for electronically challenged? ;D

Did you check for what McBie mentioned? A small write protect switch? Some older Flash drives had a switch like that. If there is none I have a feeling someone installed a write protection to the flash drive. I have found many sites using Google that discuss removing the protection but it's all for Windows. Try a google search for not being able to format a Flash Drive.