Bought a SanDisk Cruzer 16GB and found some smart software preinstalled which did not consider smart at all. Everytime I inserted the drive on any computer a CD drive with label U3 System“was mounted containing some funny .exe files. The whole “CD drive” took several MB of diskspace.
I wanted to get rid of it. Fortunately, I was not the first one beeing disturbed.
Sourceforge has a u3-tool which did the job:
- Download the tool to a place where you remember it
- Unpack the .tar.gz archive (I just rightclicked it and chose “extract here”). This creates a folder like /MyPathTo/u3-tool-0.3/
- open a terminal and type:
cd /MyPathTo/u3-tool-0.3/
./configure
make
sudo make install
Now u3-tool is installed and can be used. - To remove the CD-like partition containing the firmware crap you need the device name of the USB disk:
sudo fdisk -lgives the answer. In my case it is/dev/sdb1. Make shure you remember the right one. - Remove the U3 partition with
u3-tool -p 0 /dev/sdb1where /dev/sdb1 is the device name remembered from the previous step and the option -p is followed by a zero.
Done.
Rforge 