what the problem is that now it wont work because apparently all the files on it that it needs to work are gone too

i asked my friend and he said something about getting firmware to flash it, but i cant find any...

is there any hope for me?

please help me out

the usb drive i have is a sandisk 1GB cruzer mini

You probably need to partition and format it.

In windows you can do this with the Disk Management utility
Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management

In the Storage module, click Disk Management

Your drive (if its recognized) will be listed on the right. Here you can partition and format. USE CAUTION! You dont want to format the wrong disk!