usbkeys with U3 and their removal?

[Robin Laing]

John Wendel wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 15:38 -0800, John Wendel wrote:
>>> Robin Laing wrote:
>>>
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>>> If you have comments or concerns, this is a link to the discussion 
>>>> forums on U3.
>>>> http://u3community.com/
>>>>
>>>> In the "Wishlist", the request has been made for Linux support.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Just so I can understand what's going on here ...
>>>
>>> Does "dd /dev/zero /dev/sdx" to the unmounted usb key followed by 
>>> repartitioning / formatting work to remove this crap?
>>
>> It would have to be "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1" and
>> I don't know if it'd work or not.  Unless there's some hardware flag
>> on the drive that turns the U3 portion into a read-only physical device
>> it should work.
>>
> 
> Sorry 'bout the lazy "dd" command.
> 
> Yes, it would seem that it should work, but people are reporting that 
> they had to get a "Windows using friend" to fix the thing. I don't have 
> such a device, but I may in the future (and I don't do Windows), so I 
> was curious.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John
> 

I tried that on one of my SanDisk Cruzer the other night.  I tried 
different versions of dd, even to the point of over writing the whole 
drive using dd.

 From what I could find, the partition that is uses is a read-only 
partition and is hardware controlled.  Some code in the removal software 
must turn this on/off.  I know that the windows software writes directly 
to the video driver and won't work with dual display monitors.

-- 
Robin Laing