Can you help me to un-mess up this borrowed USB flash drive

A computer idiot writes: ....

I've borrowed a colleagues 16Gb flash drive to help me upgrade my PS3 hard drive.
He tells me to delete anything that's on it, and I do.
It's working fine.

I am aware the PS3 will only recognise FAT32, so I download SwissKnife (following net advice re: formatting in FAT32).
I run SwissKnife and (without reading about how to use the program) click the most immediately obvious format button.
The end result is that it now doesn't work and SwissKnife now says that "the media is write protected"

I know that (even more stupidly) the flash drive was almost certainly already formatted to FAT32 anyway.

If you could help me sort this out, I would be the MOST grateful of all the eternally grateful.

Yours in embarrassment,
David.

 

PS...

My Computer (XP) says that the drive is "not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

My Computer (Vista) says the same.
When I try to use the 'safe removal' button, it says that it cant as another program is using it.

I Googled the problem, and tried to use a repair utility from Apacer, but it couldn't see the drive.

Brilliant work, even by my standards of ineptitude

 

Tried all sorts, then found a post on here which mentioned Killdisk

Downloaded and ran that ... all fine now.

Phew.