How do I get rid of “U3 System” on my USB drive?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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. There is also supposedly an uninstaller application at the U3 website but I can't get the site to load for me currently

Answer 3

U3 Uninstaller is windows only. Available here:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Uninstallers/U3-Launchpad-Removal-Tool.shtml

I know of no way to do this in Linux.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

You can't, unless the drive contains software to tell it to stop doing that (and that software would probably be Windows only).

It is the drive itself that identifies itself as two units on the USB-bus instead of just one. One being the actual disk, and the other a CD-ROM with the U3 software.