How to remove usb stick U3 partition
 

Hi. I want to make a slackware usb install stick. I have a 4GB usb stick. Somehow it has a partition U3 which contains some windows stuff, 6.9MB in total. I cannot erase it. I cannot write to it.

gparted does not see this partition. I just used gparted to wipe out all data on the stick and then create an empty FAT32 partition, but the U3 partition survived that! Where the hell is it?

I can use the slackware usbimg script to write to the stick. But on boot, the bios sees the U3 partition, and not the usbslack boot partition.

How to kill U3, remove it, take control of my usb stick?? Can I dd it dead??

You might want to read the Wikipedia info, here -->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3

At the bottom they tell you how to get rid of the stuff. SanDisk has a removal tool;

here-->http://u3.sandisk.com/launchpadremoval.htm

Another option, buy a memory stick that doesn't have this stuff installed. They are cheap enough.

Yeah thanks. Just need to make sure I don't get another one with a U3 invisible partition.

What use is that anyway?

As I understand it, you can use U3 to install and launch windoze programs from the USB stick.

I would like to know why gparted doesn't see or touch the U3 partition. What address range is it using? How can it be read only, if I don't want it to be? The permission can't be changed! This is Linux, not Windoze!

This is from the Wiki...

The ones to answer this question is SanDisk.