HowTo – Remove the U3 system from your thumb drive
I love lifehacker.com. I always find usefull posts like this one below.
http://lifehacker.com/5057484/remove-u3-to-speed-up-your-flash-drive
This is very useful for us Linux users. It’s so annoying to plug a u3 drive into a linux o/s. Anyhow download the utility and clean up your U3 enabled usb thumb drive here: http://www.u3.com/uninstall/default.aspx
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I’m trying this method from a post at:
http://noisetheatre.blogspot.com/2006/08/uninstall-u3-and-free-your-usb-drive.html
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Peter wrote at 21 January, 2009 05:21…
So hopefully someone will find this useful. After lots of googling I found that there weren’t any instructions for removing U3 under linux. Truth be told, it’s really easy, but the solution is as obscure as it is easy.
1)Mount the U3 “cd” partition
2)Run Mount to find out the name of the device that U3 is on. It should be some thing like scd#, the important part is the number there.
2.5) Just to be sure you’ve got the right device check that /dev/sr# is a symlink to /dev/scd# that you just found.
3) Now that you know which device you’re looking for you can start the actual removal. cd to /sys/class/block/sr#/device/
4)In this directory is a file named delete, it’s write only by root, and if you write to it (I’ve only ever tried with “1″) the U3 partition will be removed. With root privileges ‘echo “1″ > delete’ removes it quite nicely.
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Here was my results:
1) I just plugged it in, it automounted
2) jim@mickey:~$ mount
… /dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8,umask=077)
2.5) jim@mickey:~$ ls -l /dev/sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2009-05-12 07:04 /dev/sr0 -> scd0
3) jim@mickey:~$ cd /sys/block/sr0/device/
jim@mickey:/sys/block/sr0/device$ ls -l delete
–w——- 1 root root 4096 2009-05-14 11:32 deletjim@mickey:/sys/block/sr0/device$ sudo -i
root@mickey:~# cd /sys/block/sr0/device
root@mickey:/sys/block/sr0/device# echo “1″ > root@mickey:/sys/block/sr0/device# exit
After all that, it didn’t appear to do anything. I must be missing a step. I plugged it into a Win2k machine, and the U3 launchpad came up. I removed the software using the uninstall feature of U3.
So I guess that was a bust, but I’ll have more drives in the future to try this with.
This series of steps only removes the drive *temporarily* The read-only system on the U3 drive reinstalls the app when you remount the volume.