[PLUG] Formatting thumb drive

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Sat Nov 18 03:46:51 UTC 2006


John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 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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>   
Well ... have you tried formatting it on the Windows machine? My 
experience has been that formatting a USB drive on Linux

mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sdxn

gives you something that Linux has no problems with, but Windows may or 
may not like. However, if you format it on Windows, Linux won't have a 
problem with it.

Now -- on to mounting. You might need to mount your flash drive 
"umask=000" on Linux. In some cases, you'll need to be root to write on 
it if you don't do that.

Finally, unless you want to move stuff around between Windows, MacOS and 
Linux systems on it, there's really not much reason to format it FAT32. 
If you're going to use it exclusively on Linux, ext2 is a much better 
way. For one thing, the bogosities associated with upper and lower case 
translations go away, and the umask=000 isn't necessary.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.




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