*REALLY* formatting a USB flash drive

[trmatthe]

Hi. I have a standard 256 MB USB2 flash drive. It presents itself to
Windows XP and Linux as two parts - a floppy drive and a mass storage
device of around 240 MB.

What I would like to do is remove the floppy emulation section and
partition it as a single partition.

Under linux I have been able to modify the partition table for the mass
storage component (fdisk on /dev/sdb) , but not the floppy emulation.
Does anybody have any suggestions ?

thanks,
Tim

[....]

I have not run inot (or heard of) this problem before. What make/model is
your USB flash drive? (All of mine have been recognized as a 256MB
removable hard drive.)

Have you tried looking at it via XP's Disk management console, to see if it
might be partitioned at the hardware level? It may have come from the
factory like that to solve a backward compatibility issue. in which case you
might be able to re-partition and re-format.

Hope this helps.
J

"trmatthe" <trma...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1104682684.5...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...

[Arno Wagner]

> Hope this helps.
> J

If it shows up as two devices (try "lsusb"), then that is a
hardware/firmware feature and you can likely not do anything
about it. I also don't think there is a way to get this effect
purely in software, i.e. there has to be some hardware support
on the device itself for this.

Arno
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[trmatthe]

I have tried this and it's weird. It shows up the main disk partition.
of around 240 MB but delete is greyed out. It only shows one partition
as well. Even after I did a fdisk on it in Linux, the floppy section
was still there. I might try a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb to see if I
can really zap the partitioning.

The USB unit itself is some generic model rebranded by Play.com.

I'm not hugely bothered about this any more. I'm quite tempted to buy
one of the 1 GB models and actually perform a full OS install on it -
especially as all of my current machines will boot from USB.

thanks both of you for your help,
Tim

ps Will continue twiddling and post a summary of anything I find.