Sandisk USB stick with U3

[Mick M.]

Hello;
  I had a friend come over with a USB stick.
I had put Mint linux on his laptop, and now he could not write to the stick.

I realized it was a Sandisk with their stupid U3.exe stuff on it.
I went through this last year and used a Windows program to remove the U3 stuff and reformat it.

Is there any way to do this in Linux?

I remember I used fdisk to make it ext2, and formatted it.
It still would not work.

Mick M.

Standard guarantee applies - 30 feet or 30 seconds, whichever comes first.

#  find / -name "*your base*" -exec chown us:us {} ;

[Dale Dellutri]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 5:37 AM, Mick M.  wrote:
> Hello;
>  I had a friend come over with a USB stick.
> I had put Mint linux on his laptop, and now he could not write to the
> stick.
>
> I realized it was a Sandisk with their stupid U3.exe stuff on it.
> I went through this last year and used a Windows program to remove the U3
> stuff and reformat it.
>
> Is there any way to do this in Linux?
>
> I remember I used fdisk to make it ext2, and formatted it.
> It still would not work.

You could use parted <device>, where <device> is probably /dev/sdb

Remove all the partitions, then re-create one as FAT32 if you want to be
able
to read it with a windows system, otherwise ext2.

I just did this with a USB flashdrive that had an extra software partition.

[Paolo Galtieri]

On 03/14/2010 03:30 PM, Dale Dellutri wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 5:37 AM, Mick M. <[e-mail] 
> > wrote:
> Hello;
>  I had a friend come over with a USB stick.
> I had put Mint linux on his laptop, and now he could not write to
> the stick.
>
> I realized it was a Sandisk with their stupid U3.exe stuff on it.
> I went through this last year and used a Windows program to remove
> the U3 stuff and reformat it.
>
> Is there any way to do this in Linux?
>
> I remember I used fdisk to make it ext2, and formatted it.
> It still would not work.
>
>
> You could use parted <device>, where <device> is probably /dev/sdb
>
> Remove all the partitions, then re-create one as FAT32 if you want to 
> be able
> to read it with a windows system, otherwise ext2.
>
> I just did this with a USB flashdrive that had an extra software 
> partition.
>
> -- 
> Dale Dellutri

I have a sandisk USB stick with the U3 stuff on it and I have no problem 
reading and writing to the USB stick under F12.  I plug the USB stick 
in, it shows up on my desktop and up pops the file browser window and i 
can copy to/from it just fine.  I have the ntfs-3g and fuse packages 
installed and it all works.

Paolo

[Suvayu Ali]

On 14/03/10 11:37 AM, Mick M. wrote:
> Hello;
>    I had a friend come over with a USB stick.
> I had put Mint linux on his laptop, and now he could not write to the stick.
>
> I realized it was a Sandisk with their stupid U3.exe stuff on it.
> I went through this last year and used a Windows program to remove the U3 stuff and reformat it.
>
> Is there any way to do this in Linux?

Look at the thread "Remooving U3 from USB drive." from last week of 
April 2009. I think this was discussed there.

[Mick M.]

> From: Suvayu Ali 
> Subject: Re: Sandisk USB stick with U3
> On 14/03/10 11:37 AM, Mick M. wrote:
> > Hello;
> >     I had a friend come over with a USB
>
> stick.
> > I had put Mint linux on his laptop, and now he could
>
> not write to the stick.
> > I realized it was a Sandisk with their stupid U3.exe
>
> stuff on it.
> > I went through this last year and used a Windows
>
> program to remove the U3 stuff and reformat it.
> > Is there any way to do this in Linux?
>
> Look at the thread "Remooving U3 from USB drive." from last
> week of 
> April 2009. I think this was discussed there.
>
> -- 
> Suvayu

Thanks.
I read the thread and sure enough U3 removal is windows only.

I had tried dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc
Also fdisk delete and recreate as ext2, gparted and parted.

The problem was still there.
I tried to run it under wine - no-go.
So you HAVE to boot into windows to get rid of it.

Kingston for me from now on.

Mick M

[Don Quixote de la Manvha]

Some USB drives have partitions full of Windows software hardwired
into the drive firmware.

Not just Flash drives - there are rotating USB drives that "provide"
such partitions.  One that I looked at had the installer for a backup
utility.

I expect that it would be impossible to remove those partitions from
some models of such drives, short of re-flashing the firmware with
some kind of replacement.

Don Quixote