usbkeys with U3 and their removal?

[John Wendel]

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