Remooving U3 from USB drive.

[Rick Stevens]

Beartooth wrote:
> On Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:56:51 -0500, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> 
>> A question which appeared on fedora-list recently was how to remove U#W
>> from a USB drive. I did not see a resolution until the following web
>> link:
>>
>> http://www.u3.com/uninstall
> 
> 	I've been trying to do that, and have a long thread going at
> 
> http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=1
> 
> called "How to wipe thumbdrives??" 
> 
> 	I've tried formatting under XP; under Gparted; under QTparted; 
> and going as root to a mounted one and using rm & rmdir. *Some* of my 
> thumbdrives now *seem* to be clear; and several do function as bootable 
> media with other distros.
> 
> 	Since those bootable drives are my chief current concern, I 
> haven't been nearly so meticulous about tracking what I've done with 
> which as I might; but i *think* I've picked up a joker in the deck. 
> 
> 	Afaict (and I mean what my .sig says), a given Fedora app may or 
> may not always see this U3 foulness when looking at a given thumbdrive. 
> Often Fedora will tell me a drive is empty, but show a pie chart with 
> less than 100% available space -- and an open folder with ostensibly no 
> contents.
> 
> 	There is one post in that thread with a technique using dd; I 
> haven't tried it yet, but probably will.

I have a couple of those buggers as well.  I think the dd you're
thinking of is something like:

	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=2048

or something like that...the idea being to write zeros to the entire
drive, wiping out its partition table and all.

It does NOT work on the SanDisk Cruzers.  I ran the dd three times on
each, writing all 4GB of data to them (took forever!).  Fired up fdisk
and it reported a gparted-type partition table on them.  The partition
table should have been wiped out via the dd.

I then ran gparted itself.  It did NOT complain about a missing
partition table (it should have), but it did say there were no defined
partitions.  Whoopee.  Yeah, no partitions, but a gparted-style
partition table that can't be done away with.  Sheesh.

<snip>

> 	If I could find non SanDisk Cruzer thumbdrives here, I'd never 
> buy another.

I now buy nothing but PNY or Apacer thumbdrives.  If I'm in doubt and
if the package says that something's preloaded, I treat them like
toxic waste.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks at nerd.com -
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