When trying to clear a USB memory stick with diskpart I encountered this error:
DISKPART> clean DiskPart has encountered an error: Access is denied. See the System Event Log for more information.
The System event log contained this error from VDS Basic Provider:
Cannot zero sectors on disk \\?\PhysicalDrive2. Error code: 5@0101000F
The problem was solved simply by running clean again:
DISKPART> clean DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk.
After that a partition could be created and formatted.
Warning: Always be very careful when using diskpart.
In order to avoid data loss make sure to list disks, select the correct disk and list disks again before running diskpart clean.