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An odd request... (format USB drive)

MacPossum

MacPossum

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 15, 2007
280
0
I'm looking for a way to effectivly format my USB flash drive. It came preloaded with U3 software and well.. it doesn't do anything to my mac but the software attempts to launch whenever I plug it into a friends PC. Not everyone has seen the light... anyways, is there a way to format my USB drive through OS X and remove this software completely? Moving it to the trash from the flashdrive doesn't work as the software cannot be taken from the drive.
 
I have heard that U3 can be rather intransigent about being removed, but I think Disk Utility.app is what you want to use. You can format drives (any kind of drive) using the application. It is part of OS X, usually in /Applications/Utilities/
 
Well, you could always just format it on your friends pc when you hook it up to that. Just transfer the files you want on it, reformat and transfer the files back. I did that when I bought my flash drive, but I had bought it for mainly file transfers in XP so I didn't even think to do this in OSX.
 
Hey! I did exactly this a while back.
I reformatted it with disk utility several times to no avail.
If you plug it into a PC, you should be able to access a preference/application pane of some sort. It will probably be accessible through one of those icons in the lower right hand corner (on XP).
This is where I found the option for mine to uninstall U3. I don't remember the exact steps as this was a while ago, but dig around and you should be able to find it. I could ONLY find it on an XP computer.
 
No luck with Disk Utility, it won't allow me to mess with the U3 software :/ I guess I'll just have to wait to plug it into a PC again.
 
I formatted mine with Disk Utility as HFS+ Journaled and then later reformatted as FAT32. I'm pretty sure U3 is gone. I did, however, move the U3 folders to the trash beforehand.
 
Here is what I end up with. It looks completely inaccessable. I don't really see how software can make it self virtually unremovable on something like a flash drive. I'd think that you'd be able to completely format it without the software being able to stop you :/

It's like the flash drive itself is partitioned to have both the rewrite-able flash and the unwritable U3 software garbage.
 

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MacPossum said:
Here is what I end up with. It looks completely inaccessable. I don't really see how software can make it self virtually unremovable on something like a flash drive. I'd think that you'd be able to completely format it without the software being able to stop you :/
Click to expand...

Are you sure you've selected that drive and not that volume on the drive (sorry if I'm not using the right terms here)? For instance, is there a USB drive icon right above the SanDisk U3 flash drive USB drive icon? If so, try erasing it there. If that doesn't work, try deleting the partitions and re-creating them.
 
ingenious said:
Are you sure you've selected that drive and not that volume on the drive (sorry if I'm not using the right terms here)? For instance, is there a USB drive icon right above the SanDisk U3 flash drive USB drive icon? If so, try erasing it there. If that doesn't work, try deleting the partitions and re-creating them.
Click to expand...

I just added another picture, what I'm trying to format is the actual U3 drive, not the 1.9gb.
 
invasian said:
it seems that the only way to remove it is to put it in a windows machine and uninstall the software...

read here for more information, it seems that that was the conclusion.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-63205.html
Click to expand...

Looks like it. Oh well, I'll just download some more of that nifty U3 uninstall software and put it on the drive itself and then remove this garbage once I get to another windoze computer.
 
MacPossum said:
Looks like it. Oh well, I'll just download some more of that nifty U3 uninstall software and put it on the drive itself and then remove this garbage once I get to another windoze computer.
Click to expand...

Let me know what happens, because maybe I really don't have the U3 software uninstalled! Who knows?!:D I don't use my flash drive with Windows PCs often enough to absolutely know for sure, I guess.
 
Here is what I did.

I tried everything that I could think of on the Mac side with no success. Note, I didn't do any Unix stuff directly, so there may be something that works that way.

Then I DL'ed the U3 uninstall program from their site.

I ran the uninstall application using Windows XP via parallels. The USB drive reverted to the normal one partition.

This method worked well.

Thanks for the suggestion to use the U3 uninstall application.
 
sushi said:
Here is what I did.

I tried everything that I could think of on the Mac side with no success. Note, I didn't do any Unix stuff directly, so there may be something that works that way.

Then I DL'ed the U3 uninstall program from their site.

I ran the uninstall application using Windows XP via parallels. The USB drive reverted to the normal one partition.

This method worked well.

Thanks for the suggestion to use the U3 uninstall application.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply; I'm glad it finally worked out for you!
 
ingenious said:
Thanks for the reply; I'm glad it finally worked out for you!
Click to expand...
Thanks!

After using the U3 uninstall application, that seems to be a painless way to do it.

U3 has two types of uninstallers:
- Sandisk
- Others

So it looks like most companies have the same type of software installed.
 
That's crazy, I just reformatted my U3 drive and that worked fine to remove the software. I wonder if the software is harder to get off now, as it was about a year ago I reformatted it.
 
Royale w/cheese said:
That's crazy, I just reformatted my U3 drive and that worked fine to remove the software. I wonder if the software is harder to get off now, as it was about a year ago I reformatted it.
Click to expand...
My guess is that they have changed the setup.

I purchased mine about a month or so ago. It is a PNY 1GB one.

The U3 partition on my USB flash drive was formated as a CD.

None of my Mac or Windows software would remove the partition. So I took the suggestion to go to their site and DL the uninstall application. It worked fine.

Note, on the Mac side I did not try Unix utilities so they may have worked, but I do not know.
 
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