Keep far far away from all U3 enabled flash drives.
I went out and bought a 1GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro drive yesterday from Best Buy for $49.99. The drive itself is cute enough, feels solid, and is amazingly small for 1GB, at least when I consider how things have changed in the past 10 years. Regardless of how great the thing is on the outside it totally sucks on the inside. I plugged the thing in and it went through the normal deal of detecting the device. But what’s this it detected two devices. One being the normal disk drive and the other being a 4MB CD-ROM device <argh>. Immediately I set out to get rid of this U3 junk, especially since I didn’t even realize the thing came with it and didn’t know what it was before I bought it. USB Flash devices aren’t exactly something I’m wildly excited to read about in the news.
That’s where the problems started. First off, you can’t just format it, you can’t format a CDROM. And because it actually appears as two devices in Windows you can’t just remove the partitions and all that. So I tried the Ultimate Boot CD and tried wiping it that way, argh, the volume is write protected. I tried examining it at a lower level and wiping it that way. Still nothing.
So at this point I’ve given up, I think the only solution is for SanDisk to release a tool that will recognize the device, update whatever firmware there is and reflash the piece of crap. I’ve tried finding a geeks tool to do this but haven’t been successful and am too annoyed to continue.
At this point I only have one piece of advice. Look for the U3 logo on any flash drive you buy and avoid it. It’s totally useless, you can’t remove it from the drive and get whatever space it’s taking up back. This 1GB SanDisk only has 973MB available after formatting with FAT32. Yuck.
UPDATE: I finally remembered to look it up and finally found the U3_Uninstaller.exe app that’s needed to remove the U3 stuff. Looks like it’s from the Best Buy Geek Squad instead of coming from U3 or SanDisk (who still don’t have it up). It was a bit odd on first run complaining about too many devices but unplugging and replugging in the device reset it. Rather than hosting the file dubiously here are the links to the places that might have the file…
Arstechnica Forums
U3 Community Forums
NeoWin Forums
But it’s at least that U3 junk is gone from the device. Annoyingly the device still only reports 973MB total and it doesn’t look like I can recover anything further.
Tags: Rants
January 16th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
I’m having the same exact problem. The wierd thing is, my roommate bought the same exact cruzer and when he plugged it into his machine he only had one partition, with some install file on it, and he simply deleted them. I’m going to try calling sandisk and see what i can find out.
January 19th, 2006 at 7:26 am
have you tried in the Device Manager panel to remove or disable it?
hi, I had this thing happen to me with daemon tools, and this helped solve the problem:
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/showthread.php?t=2138
October 18th, 2006 at 7:56 pm
"At this point I only have one piece of advice. Look for the U3 logo on any flash drive you buy and avoid it. It’s totally useless, you can’t remove it from the drive and get whatever space it’s taking up back. This 1GB SanDisk only has 973MB available after formatting with FAT32. Yuck."
You rant and rave because you’re not smart enough to buy the right hardware? Weak man, weak. Totally useless? You’re a moron. U3 does what it says and does it well. Read the packaging. Every U3 package clearly outlines its functionality. If you knew anything about hard drives, flash drives, iPod, whatever, you’d also know that formatted drives are always less than what they are out of the box.
If you’re gonna bitch and whine and advise others to flee from U3, at least buy a frickin’ clue before you make an ignorant post like this one.
October 18th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Thanks for the wonderful comment.
1. It was the right hardware.
2. It was on sale for $50 at the time which was a steal.
3. I knew it had U3. I did figure it would be easily removed and not embedded in the device.
4. U3 is fine for those that want to use it but bad for those that want a nice clean storage device with nothing added.
5. And yes 1MB isn’t 1000KB it’s 1024KB. I’m fully aware of the way storage devices work and the way they’re marked on the label and the way Windows will report the storage.
6. With the U3 removed and the device formatted correctly you’re able to get an extra 12MB of space.
7. Finally if people were so happy with U3 why then have I had so many people come here and click through to find out how to remove it?