Strange booting problem

[Gordon Messmer]

On 06/25/2015 11:33 AM, jd1008 wrote:
> I bought the usb drive brand new and had not installed anything
> on it. Just partitioned it and used it.
> So, how could it contain any boot code?
> Is this what manufacturers do by default? I had not encountered
> this issue you raise before.

Have a look at it:

dd if=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1 | od -c

Does it have anything other than nul bytes?