Removing U3 Partitions on USB Drives in Linux (tummy.com, ltd. Journal Entry)
tummy.com: we do linux

Friday September 18, 2009 at 01:35
Subject: Removing U3 Partitions on USB Drives in Linux
Keywords: Linux, USB
Posted by: Sean Reifschneider

After digging around some and finding that my Sandisk Cruzer 32GB was failing to work in my car stereo because it was showing up as a CD-ROM drive because of "U3" crud (a Windows convenience), Jim DeWitt found a Linux utility that I was able to use to get rid of that CD-ROM partition without requiring me to find a Windows machine.

I wanted to make this post so that others in a similar situation could find it, since I wasn't able to find anything by search for things like "linux u3 uninstall".

There's a program called "u3-tool" at Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/u3-tool/). This tool built easily enough, but I ran into issues when trying to use it via libusb.

What I ended up doing was running "./src/u3-tool -p0 /dev/sdb". That caused it to create a 0-length U3 partition. At that point, ejecting and re-inserting the USB drive caused it to only show the USB storage device, and not the CD-ROM device.
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