Reformatting a USB stick that shows up as two devices?

[Derek Broughton]

Adam Funk wrote:

> On 2008-11-21, Neil wrote:
> 
>> What is the exact brand and type of the disk?
> 
> All it says:
> 
>         integral
>          128 MB
>    USB 2.0 Flash Drive
> 
>> It may be as people have already suggested: 2 separate disks for some
>> reason (most probably), but it may be that the same disk is displayed
>> twice for some reason. Have you actually written files to the disk?
>> If these files apear in both disks you should forget about it, it's
>> just irritating and a minor incompatibility problem between the stick
>> and Linux.
> 
> No, they really act like two different drives, on Linux, Windows, and
> Mac OS X.

I'm really surprised that nobody has used the term "U3".  Ken Loafman 
seems to have it right, though he didn't mention it.  It's almost 
certainly a U3 drive, which basically has a small read-only partition 
which, on Windows, appears as a CD drive and controls access to the 
larger partition.  They can usually be reformatted, but is it really 
worth it?
-- 
derek