USB thumb drive has hidden files

[macmesser]

I just purchased a couple of USB thumb drives from Microcenter to make system restore disks. I was surprised to see that 4.24 GB were used for 7011 items on both nominally 64GB flash drives. I have no idea what these files are nor why they're not visible in the finder. I'm planning on just reformatting the drives.

The above raises some more (probably dumb) questions for me. Is there a specific formatting I should use with a USB flash drive? Also, in disk utility the device shows up as "61.92 media" but it has a "USB disk" volume under it. When formatting or testing, does it make a difference whether the device or volume is selected in disk utility and what's the difference between selecting one or the other?

I appreciate any help in getting up to speed on some basics...

 

[MisterMe]

Hidden files on new drives is hardly a new development. Since installing Dropbox on all of my devices, I rarely--as in never for months on end--use thumb drives anymore. Back when I relied on them, most thumb drives shipped preformatted FAT. Many included a U3 partition for hiding sensitive files.

I used a Windows computer to remove the U3 partition. For most of my thumb drives, I formatted HFS+ Journaled for exclusive Mac use. None of my Windows machines gave NTFS as an option for formatting thumb drives. I used the free NTFS-3G NTFS driver to format my cross-platform thumb drives as NTFS. A thumb drive formatted NTFS using my Mac can be read and written on virtually every USB-compatible Windows computer still in use.

I said all that to say this. You should zero (0) issues if you remove those hidden files. However, I am curious about the nature of the files. In the past, I found that you must use a utility on the drive to remove the hidden files and recover the space that they occupy.

 

[macmesser]

Hidden files on new drives is hardly a new development. Since installing Dropbox on all of my devices, I rarely--as in never for months on end--use thumb drives anymore. Back when I relied on them, most thumb drives shipped preformatted FAT. Many included a U3 partition for hiding sensitive files.

I used a Windows computer to remove the U3 partition. For most of my thumb drives, I formatted HFS+ Journaled for exclusive Mac use. None of my Windows machines gave NTFS as an option for formatting thumb drives. I used the free NTFS-3G NTFS driver to format my cross-platform thumb drives as NTFS. A thumb drive formatted NTFS using my Mac can be read and written on virtually every USB-compatible Windows computer still in use.

I said all that to say this. You should zero (0) issues if you remove those hidden files. However, I am curious about the nature of the files. In the past, I found that you must use a utility on the drive to remove the hidden files and recover the space that they occupy.

I'm curious as to what those files are as well. Before I repartition and reformat them (I figure that ought to ensure that everything gets deleted) I'll see if I can examine them using TechTool Pro or Drive Genius. Do you have another suggestion as to how they can be rendered visible?

 

[waw74]

open terminal

"ls -a /Volumes/Name Of Drive"

using the tab key to auto-complete names, or see what your options are

 

[macmesser]

open terminal

"ls -a /Volumes/Name Of Drive"

using the tab key to auto-complete names, or see what your options are

-bash: Is: command not found

Must be in wrong shell

 

[Alrescha]

-bash: Is: command not found

Must be in wrong shell

It is "ls" rather than "is".

A.

 

[macmesser]

It is "ls" rather than "is".

A.

Last login: Fri Nov 7 22:19:58 on ttys000
mac-pro-8:~ tcamilleri$ ls -a/Volumes/USB DISK
ls: illegal option -- /
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUWabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]
mac-pro-8:~ tcamilleri$ ls -a /Volumes/USB DISK
ls: /Volumes/USB: No such file or directory
ls: DISK: No such file or directory
mac-pro-8:~ tcamilleri$

I don't use the command line- must be doing something wrong here: second time I typed lower case LS then space then dash plus lower case A, then space, then "/Volumes/USB DISK"

first time I typed -a/ (no space between -a and slash)

 

[Alrescha]

You might try this:

cd /Volumes
ls

That will get you a list of the mounted volumes, one of which should be your USB drive.

Then you can cd name-of-USB-drive and do another ls, and so on. If the name of the USB drive is long or contains spaces, it is best to type cd and the first letter of the name and then hit tab to let the shell complete the name for you, e.g:

cd U<tab>

will expand into "cd USB_DRIVE" (if that is what it is called). Remember as you explore to use "ls -a" to see hidden files.

A.

 

[macmesser]

You might try this:

cd /Volumes
ls

That will get you a list of the mounted volumes, one of which should be your USB drive.

Then you can cd name-of-USB-drive and do another ls, and so on. If the name of the USB drive is long or contains spaces, it is best to type cd and the first letter of the name and then hit tab to let the shell complete the name for you, e.g:

cd U<tab>

will expand into "cd USB_DRIVE" (if that is what it is called). Remember as you explore to use "ls -a" to see hidden files.

A.

Thanks. Got it. The listing was as follows:

mac-pro-8:Volumes tcamilleri$ ls
Boot		Scratch		TM_Data
Data		TM_Boot		USB DISK
mac-pro-8:Volumes tcamilleri$ cd USB\ DISK/
mac-pro-8:USB DISK tcamilleri$ ls -a
.		.Spotlight-V100	._.Trashes	.vbt5
..		.Trashes	.fseventsd

Doesn't look too interesting.