I have encountered a problem, that I have never before encountered.
I have a Nashua 8GB USB flash drive that I have formatted for different purposes many times.

Recently I wanted to format it to NTFS and transfer a movie to it so I could watch it on my smartTV. Something I have done before with no problems. For some reason, the formatting process stops (as in just stays at the same percentage completed on the load bar indefinitely) while I was formatting it with the default Disks tool in Ubuntu 12.04.
Eventually I just cancel the formatting and it unmounts and disappears from the list of media in the Disks tool. I pull out the flash drive and insert it again. It seems to work and it appears that the drive has actually been formatted to NTFS, so I just decide to start transferring the movie. It fails, and I end up trying to format it again with no luck.

Everytime I insert it initially Nautilus tries to read it and gives me
**Sorry, could not display all the contents of "usb-USB\_DISK2.0.....": Error when getting information for file "/mnt/usb-USB\_DISK2.0...../movie.mkv":input/output error**

Everytime I attempt to format it with Disks tool it gives me
**Error wiping device: Command-line`wipefs -a "/dev/sdb1"` exited with non-zero exit status 1:wipefs:error:/dev/sdb1:probing initialization failed (udisks-error-quark, 0)**

I have tried with GParted, but had no luck with that either. Gave practically the same error. I have also tried various terminal commands suggested on this forum for similar problems. Unfortunately don't remember exactly which.

Anyone got any ideas? Any suggestions will be appreciated.