Formatting pendrive in Linux

Hai,

Recently i got stuck with a problem and my 512 memory stick reads "0 items but with 7MB free space".The problem sounds too odd & i don't know the reasons why the deleted items still remain in the pendrive even after deleting.

It appears as tho the items got deleted but wen i see in XP the items deleted remain
in the pendrive within a trash folder.

Does anyone knew the reason for this unpredictable behaviour?
Or can anybody suggest some commands on formatting pendrive in Linux?

Thanks in advance,
Kirthi.

sounds like you might have multiple partitions on it. you can use fdisk to delete any partitions that may be on there and then create one and format it. if you already have fdisk after mounting your thumbdrive on linux simply

fdisk "device"

device would be for example /dev/sda or someting like that depending what sda your pen drive is listed as it might be sda0 or sda1. if you need info on how to use fdisk

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/

has some good info on fdisk for linux usage.
just make sure you use FAT as the file system so all OS can read and write to it.