I recently discovered the true evil of the included software on my Sandisk Cruzer Micro 1 GB flash drive with "U3 Smart" technology.
It automatically installs this U3 program onto any Windows PC it is plugged into. Also, the drive itself is partitioned such that a small portion is recognized by WinXP Pro as a CD drive. Therefore, the files on this "CD" partition can't be easily removed by me.
When I erase the program files on the writable partition of the flash drive, they come back the next time I check the drive. I think this happens because the files on the unwritable partition get copied over every time I plug in the drive.
Also, (and here's where it gets really evil) the U3 program that was automatically installed is near impossible to remove. It's not in the add/remove programs list, it's not in the registry, and it's not running as a service. Yet, even after I had a friend open up the flash drive in linux and remove the partitions, and format the drive by writing 0 to every bit, the files were magically back the next time I plugged the drive into a PC with the hidden program. The hidden program restored all the deleted files on the USB device!
So, does anyone know how I can erase this hidden program on my PC and Flash drive once and for all?
Thank you.
It automatically installs this U3 program onto any Windows PC it is plugged into. Also, the drive itself is partitioned such that a small portion is recognized by WinXP Pro as a CD drive. Therefore, the files on this "CD" partition can't be easily removed by me.
When I erase the program files on the writable partition of the flash drive, they come back the next time I check the drive. I think this happens because the files on the unwritable partition get copied over every time I plug in the drive.
Also, (and here's where it gets really evil) the U3 program that was automatically installed is near impossible to remove. It's not in the add/remove programs list, it's not in the registry, and it's not running as a service. Yet, even after I had a friend open up the flash drive in linux and remove the partitions, and format the drive by writing 0 to every bit, the files were magically back the next time I plugged the drive into a PC with the hidden program. The hidden program restored all the deleted files on the USB device!
So, does anyone know how I can erase this hidden program on my PC and Flash drive once and for all?
Thank you.