[Nottingham] U3 Flash Drives

[ForkBombFluf]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008, Bob Marshall wrote:

> If I remember correctly, there was something in a recent Micro Mart 
> about U3 drives, but I'm almost certain that the ISO 9660 "partition", 
> which is the way the drive and its apps can start straight off isn't 
> writable.
>
> I had a U3 drive and got quite p***ed off with it, so I stripped out the 
> partition and loaded it up with stuff from "Portable Apps", which worked 
> just as well, IMHO.
>
> Sorry I can't be of more help.
>
> Bob.

Hi Bob,

No problem, and thanks for the reply.

Funnily enough The U3 on my SanDisk, which is touted to make life with 
Windows so much happier and easier, renders both of my XP installs 
completely unresponsive-- fixed only by rebooting!  (After a bit of 
reading, I'm guessing this may be due to installations of Nero freaking 
out over the ISO9660 volume, but all the same...)  The U3 stuff does seem 
to load and work OK on some other Windows machines though.

Further to what I posted before, there does seem to be a way to disable 
the Launchpad autolaunching in Windows (at least with some versions of U3) 
It would appear that the utility just writes an empty file called 
DisableAutoRun.txt in the hidden "System" folder on the main (writeable) 
partition of the drive.  Unfortunately this does nothing to alter the 
existance of the ISO9660 volume, though. (and still crashes my XP 
installs.  Die, U3, die!)

Disturbingly, there still seems to be no simple removal tool available at 
all for non-Windows systems.

Were you able to remove the ISO9660 partition from your flash drive under 
Linux using some combo of fdisk, dd, parted, etc?  I thought this might be 
troublesome, seeing as I was having no success in unmounting it in Kubuntu 
(constantly says its in use, even though I've not opened anything on it). 
Is there an easy way to stop it mounting in the first place, then clobber 
it?

Cheers,

-Stef