Remove the U3 System Partition from Cruzer Flash Drives

FettesPS — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:01:49 +0000

Everyone has probably 2 or 3 USB flash drives lying around these days. Even if one of them is just an old 32mb drive that you just can’t bring your self to toss in the trash. Many of the newer flash drives, especially those made by SanDisk, come with a second partition on it that causes your Windows system to display two auto play popups (which can be disabled) and on top of that it will launch a program in your tray which almost everyone I’ve ever known has never even used. I personally just got into the habbit of clicking my way through these screens, just because it was faster to do that than spending the time finding a way to stop it. Today I decided I had enough.

My newest flash drive is an 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Mini. I decided to go with it because my first one (128mb) has gone through the wash a dozen times, been lost for long periods of time and dropped more times than I can count. I have a couple of other no name ones lying around and have found they were not quite as durible. Unfortunately it came with U3 System on it, so that has to go.

Initially I thought I’d just fire up a partition program, delete the U3 System partition and resize the main partition. Windows Disk Management would not allow me to do that, it detected the U3 System partition as if it were a CD-ROM and thus did not give me the option to remove or resizes partitions. I most likely could have booted up Linux and removed it with Gparted but I had a dozen programs up and running so I wanted a fast solution that didn’t involve rebooting.

Turns out I was making things too complicated.

Click the U3 icon in your system tray
Click ‘Settings’
Select ‘U3 Launchpad Settings’
Select ‘Uninstall’
Select ‘Uninstall U3 Launchpad’

*face palm*

FettesPS » cruzer mini

Remove the U3 System Partition from Cruzer Flash Drives