Windows 7: USB drive erasing problem

Firestrider · 26 Apr 2010

Quote: Originally Posted by misterbk

Quote: Originally Posted by hubris

Quote: Originally Posted by Firestrider

Hey thanks for the replies guys,

I made a LiveUSB thumbdrive with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS RC and found out the offending thumbdrive is labeled /dev/sdd recognized as 1.7 GB with no partitions (e.g. sdd1, sdd2). I did the command "sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdd" and it said it performed the write over 1.7 GB.

But when I boot back into Windows it still shows that "CD-Drive icc2009.1500". Do you think this thing can never be erased?

Hi.
The system needs some space, eg; System Volume Information.

I don't think System Volume Information is what's going on. (Are you talking about the capacity lost to formatting?) The device is emulating a CD drive, showing two devices when inserted instead of one.

Firestrider, did only one device appear, and it was /dev/sdd? i.e. /dev/sdc was already present without the thumbdrive? (Not that it matters much I guess. If the thumbdrive is emulating the CD drive as part of its device architecture, either it can't be undone or you need a special tool that can talk to the proprietary thumbdrive gadgetry inside. Similar to U3 but a different brand maybe.)

Does the emulated CD drive have any contents? What's in there? If you can figure out what company's software was meant to run off the fake CD thing their site might have a solution.

OTOH, this may not be worth the time and effort... I take it this isn't exactly a brand new flash stick. You could probably replace it with something double the size for dirt cheap.

Yeah, the only device that showed up that was different when the thumbdrive was not plugged in was /dev/sdd.

So, the thumbdrive has some special firmware on it that makes the CD drive part permanent? I doubt this drive has some tool to remove the CD drive as they were given out for free at a conference with PDF whitepapers and such on them.

I just wanted if this drive could be wiped easily... but I guess not.

misterbk · 27 Apr 2010

Yeah it seems that way.

The CD emulated portion of the device probably showed up as /dev/cdrom1 or /dev/scd1 or something and that's why it didn't show up in the list.

Sorry you went through all the effort with the linux boot disk and all. I've run into hard drives that had "special" partitions that couldn't be deleted in Windows, but they were just partitions marked as "read only". Blasting zeroes at the partition table using Linux worked great for that, but this is something different.

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