[PLUG] Formatting thumb drive

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Sat Nov 18 03:25:13 UTC 2006


About a month ago I lost my 512 MB thumb drive. While waiting for it to
show up in the bottom of the washing machine (where such devices always
end up), I decided I needed a thumb drive badly enough that I bought a
brand new 1 GB drive. Last week the first one appeared in the bottom of
my backpack, so now I have two thumb drives. 

Both are SanDisk Cruzer drives. The first one performs just fine. The
second one also performs fine, but when I stick it in a USB port at a
PSU lab computer, Windows XP finds an auto-launch file that pops up a
SanDisk browser utility. This utility doesn't launch on Linux,
presumably because it is just a Windows utillity. Now, the browser
utility is really annoying. It has SanDisk plastered all over it and
stuff. There is an .exe file on the drive that evidently launches the
utility. I tried to nuke the .exe file while at the university, but
Windows XP refused to delete it. Later, with the drive on my Linux
computer I successfully deleted it.

I thought that would take care of the matter, but the next day I put it
in the USB port on a PSU computer. The damn utility popped back up
again. Lo and behold, the .exe file was back! So, sitting at the PSU
computer I pulled my Ubuntu laptop out, booted it, and stuck the thumb
drive in its USB port. The .exe file was there again. So I nuked it
again. Then I put the thumb drive back in the PSU computer. The utility
popped back up and the .exe file was back on the thumb drive!

Now, this has me seriously pissed off. If SanDisk wants to blast me
with their advertising, then they should pay *me* to use their drive.
My questions for this group are: HTF did SanDisk do this? Has SanDisk
made a pact with the devil Gates? And do I assume correctly that if I
use my Linux computer to reformat the drive (FAT32), I will finally
exorcise the evil installed on it by SanDisk?



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