Getting Rid of Weirdo U3 Partitions on USB Sticks

[Xenaflux]

I thought I pass it on

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/552671-random-linux-tips-making-kde4-behave-thwacking-those-weirdo-u3-partitions-on-usb-sticks

scroll down a little.
Thanks

[Just17]

I have never had such a device in my possession ....  but IF, as I have read, there is a separate partition created for this U3 stuff, then surely it is only a matter of wiping the MBR/PartitionTable, and recreating a new DOS partition table to eliminate the U3 stuff entirely?

Anyone doe this? .....

[Xenaflux]

I was used to just delete the stuff. End of story.
I had talked about this with a few other linux users around here. They also just deleted it, without further thinking

So, I thought it a good idea to pass on this article, so that next time, People like me learn to delete stuff ...after.....thinking 

[pags]

I have never had such a device in my possession ....  but IF, as I have read, there is a separate partition created for this U3 stuff, then surely it is only a matter of wiping the MBR/PartitionTable, and recreating a new DOS partition table to eliminate the U3 stuff entirely?

Anyone doe this? .....

A more interesting experiment might be to make a copy (dd) of the entire device (U3 partition and all), and try to write that image to a "plain" USB device, and see if the U3 partition survives the transfer...

...I know, weird stuff goes through my head.

[Just17]

I have never had such a device in my possession ....  but IF, as I have read, there is a separate partition created for this U3 stuff, then surely it is only a matter of wiping the MBR/PartitionTable, and recreating a new DOS partition table to eliminate the U3 stuff entirely?

Anyone doe this? .....

A more interesting experiment might be to make a copy (dd) of the entire device (U3 partition and all), and try to write that image to a "plain" USB device, and see if the U3 partition survives the transfer...

...I know, weird stuff goes through my head.

  It might have interesting results  

Thinking further about it ...  it may even be possible to delete the existing partitions using fdisk or one of the partition managers  ..... and then create one partition recovering the few lost MBs to U3.

[nixus]

I also did this "delete before thinking" thing ;-) I just deleted it and reformatted the drive and when I checked the local hard drives in PCC I had an 980 something MB sdb partition and a second cd drive which I assume is the old US3 partition as mentioned in the article.

The hidden partition presents itself as a USB hub with a CD drive attached. When you plug one of these into a Linux PC it looks like a normal partitioned block device to fdisk and Gparted, but in Figure 2 we see how it looks to the KDE4 Device Notifier: it sees the U3 partition as an optical device, and can mount it and read the files.

I will definitely bookmark this article. Thanks Xenaflux!!

So I assume there is no other way to get rid of it once it was simply deleted?

regards,
nixus