Repartitioning promo USB stick set to write protect?

[Jumping Anaconda]

I picked up a promo USB stick last week. When it is inserted into a Windows XP machine, it shows up as two partitions, I: and J:.

Partition I: is left empty for my use. The partition can be formatted but not deleted by XP's Disk Management tool.

Partition J: contains the promo, with 116 megs of photos. I can not delete any of the files on this partition, and any attempt to format it results in a message stating that the drive is write protected. The delete partition option is again greyed out in XP's Disk Management tool.

Is there likely to be any way I can delete these partitions and start from scratch? I am wondering if the drive might have been programmed at a firmware level to think that all the sectors on the J: partition have been used to their maximum number of cycles, making writing difficult. There are no obvious write tabs on the drive itself.

 

[QuillOmega0]

Looks like some custom partitioning. If possible you may want to plug it into a Linux system and try doing a:
"dd if=/dev/zero of=(path to drive) bs=1024 count=1"

Or in Windows run:

"diskpart"

"list disk"

"select disk (number of flash drive)"

"clean"

and in both cases you'll have to repartition and reformat, if it worked.