"U3 System" on USB Thumb Drive

[daviddoria]

Everytime I plug this thing in, a window pops up "Would you like to run this software?" and it mounts two things, the main 1gb partition and some other little weird partition. I used gparted and looked at /dev/sdc and there was only 1 partiton. I formated it and unplugged and plugged it back in and that U3 thing is still there! Any way to get rid of this?

Thanks,
Dave

[marko]

You have to go to sandisk or who ever made it, download a tool they have (runs in dos/windows only naturally) and use that to remove the special partition that the U3 stuff is on. Or I see there's this U3 link that has the U3Uninstall.exe tool:

http://u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3

there's also a sandisk specific link (Question 13 is about how to remove it)
http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Defaul...CatID=1450#Q13

I'm thinking the U3 partition is really a fake, that is gparted can't wipe it out because it's really
burned into the firmware and isn't in the flash where gparted can get it. So the uninstall
app just tells the firmware to hide the U3 partition... but this means Linux is out of luck until
someone writes a similar thing for linux. I usually ignore it, I have a memorex U3 traveldrive,
the U3 takes a 10meg chunk or so, whatever it was was small compared to my usable key space. It might also be possible to
code up a udev rule so that when udev sees that partition it ignores it.

ps. I'm surprised your Linux box offers to run that stuff, I think the U3 applets are windows code?

[DaveBooth]

U3 thumb drives have that wierd partition on there - it has some extra windows-foo on it to support encryption and allow u3-aware apps on it to run on a windows system without needing to be installed first...

the drives firmware doesnt normally allow you to zap it, but theres ways around that

plug it intpo a windows system and make use of the utilities from here... http://www.u3.com/uninstall/default.aspx

[daviddoria]

perfect - thanks