[solved]Re: repartitioning USB Storage and U3

[William Stephens]

On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 11:50 +0100, hentaidan at gmail.com wrote:
> On 4/22/06, William Stephens <wstephens10 at cox.net> wrote:
> > So in order to rid myself of this problem I ran cfdisk and deleted all
> > the partition i saw and wrote a new one and then formatted it with mkfs.
> > I got rid of some nonessential files on the drive, yet U3 crap is still
> > there.
> 
> I've heard of some devices where that sort of data is read only and
> cant be deleted?

This U3 stuff is a mess. On the package for the drive, all it says is, 

"U3 smart, Includes software to securely synchronize your files and
access on any PC**

**For growing list of U3 compatible software visit www.U3.com"

what the package did not say was that the U3 software loads itself on
any computer you stick it in and does not give the consumer to turn this
function off.  U3 or Sandisk the maker of the drive offer no official
way to get rid of the software. Further more to get any convenience out
of the crap is to spend even more money and buy supported software from
U3.com. My solution and advice for all of you is to avoid any and all
hardware associated with U3. 

cfdisk and gparted never found the U3 partition. Geek Squad offers to
clean the crap off your drive for a price. My personal solution was
hours of googling and searching broken links for a shady .exe, that was
suppose to be stolen from Geek Squad, that updates the firmware and
formats the drive without the U3 partition. Thankfully, the .exe worked
for me with no problems but was major headache for 1GB of storage. 

William S.