I have a USB drive (SanDisk SDCZ40-016G) that mounts in a way I've never seen before. When inserted, two items appear in Places -> Computer:
"SanDisk Ultra Backup: 16GB" contains my data, and "CD Drive: U3 System" contains a Windows executable. The part with the Windows executable doesn't look useful to me so I'd like to remove it. I used GParted to delete the only partition listed on the device and then I created and formatted a new partition:
Strangely, the "CD Drive" containing the Windows executable was perfectly intact after this operation.
What's going on?
16 Answers
The solution came from u3_tool (universe), which can:
- uninstall the U3 software
- reclaim the CD-ROM disk space
- run on Ubuntu
I ran sudo u3-tool -p 0 /dev/sdb and then repartitioned the drive. Now it mounts like a "normal" USB drive.
U3 is proprietary software that SanDisk loads on it's USB drive. It runs in a partition you can't reformat, or really detect, and it'll likely always be there.
If you have a Windows machine you can run the Un-installer using the guide in the SanDisk KB.
0U3 Uninstaller is windows only. Available here:
I know of no way to do this in Linux.
1Okay, here's a way to remove it on Ubuntu. First if you don't have it, do to Ubuntu Software Centre and download the 'Wine Windows Program Loader' after the download go to: And download the removal software for U3 at the end of the blog. Run the removal software with Wine and you're good to go!
I ran into a similar problem, was unable to delete a small U3 partition on my sans disk cruzer USB pen drive. I tried doing so within windows disk utility and used diskpart from the run prompt. the following didnt work for me, the u3 partition which appeared as a CD on my computer could not be deleted: SD formatter 4 did not work either:
U3 tool wouldn't run for me at all on windows 7
and
the one at sourceforge
had luck through sans disk website:
which can also be found on instructables
In Linux (for me) it appears as another disk. You might be able to format that part. Personally I will not recommend it in the odd case it stops up the device, but I doubt it would.
