I have a Sandisk U3 titanium 8GB Flash drive I brought a few years ago for $88 I think, which was cheap at the time. I installed Chrome OS on it to do a live boot and it changed the partitions on the drive. I've done it before and managed to fix it using the HP USB drive recovery thingy that formats the drive and partitions.
Well this time is different for some reason. I installed Chrome os, it worked fine, and when the weekend was over I was going to format it again and put my school work on it. The HP Utility refused to do anything because it said it was Lock Protected or something. So I tried doing a format through CMD, creating the active partition and stuff. It wouldn't format the drive. The drive shows up in Windows 7 Disk Manager as a Removable Disk, but it doesn't assign a drive letter to it. I right click and all options are greyed out, so I can't assign a letter to it, delete, shrink or create partitions. I can Format it but the Windows format thing won't format it either.

I tried some other program, can't remember the name, I'll check when I get home, but it done basically the same this as windows disk manager.

So what can I do? Any more tips on how to get this thing working again? I love this pen drive, sooooooo shiny and nice. xDD and expensive at that.

Cheers,
-Sam