Reformat USB stick with a CD ISO9660 FS

[Christopher Lees]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 00:41 +0100, ubuntu-au-request at lists.ubuntu.com
wrote:

> Subject: Reformat USB stick with a CD ISO9660 FS
> To: ubuntu-au at lists.ubuntu.com
> Message-ID: <1213270816.3087.19.camel at downstairs>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> 
> A couple of days ago the nice people from MBF handed out 512 Mb USB
> sticks at the train station.  It has a small ISO9660 (CD) partition
> which directs Windows users to their web site.  The rest (500 Mb or so)
> is left as an empty vfat partition.
> I did the right thing and went to the web site and read it in detail.
> Now I want to give the USB to my child.  He is too young to take out
> insurance so I want to remove CD partition to stop annoying pop-ups.
> It says the CD file system is read-only ?(obviously) and won't let me
> delete the files from it.  It seems the simplest thing is to just
> reformat the whole device.  However, I'm getting a little out of my
> league thinking about partitions versus the whole device.  fdisk etc.
> seem to be partition-based.  Should I just "dd" all over it?
> nb: The USB stick shows up as /dev/scd1 (ISO 9660) and /dev/sdd1 (vfat)

Recently my father asked me to do the same thing, with a USB stick from
his workplace. Gparted would just freeze when starting up if the USB
drive was connected. Cfdisk could easily reformat the writable portion,
but it couldn't touch the ISO9660 part. I tried dd'ing all over it, but
that also did not touch the ISO9660 part!

I think there must be some sort of hardware protection. Maybe the
ISO9660 part is actually a ROM chip rather than just part of the flash.
I noticed a couple of electrical stores are selling flash drives for
less than $10, so if you can't de-insurance your freebie stick, at least
you can get your son one cheaply.

The technique of having a seperate partition emulating a CD was actually
invented for the purpose of distributing a device driver on the device
itself. I'm sure the technique has never been used for its original
purpose, but the guy's got to be rich now :-)

Chris Lees