Bartender
December 5th, 2009, 06:54 PM
Just wanted to share an experience I had yesterday buying a thumb drive intended for a portable "Ubuntu-on-USB" installation.
I made the mistake of picking up a Sandisk Cruzer. It has an annoying application at the root of the drive called U3. U3 is an unnecessary geegaw designed to impress Windows users. In Linux it's a real annoyance. I tried formatting the drive with a GPartedLiveCD. GParted didn't see the U3 folder. It just saw a big old fat32 partition. I tried deleting the three files in the U3 folder but they wouldn't go away.
I was able to install Ubuntu on the Cruzer. But at the BIOS "quick-boot" menu the Cruzer was seen as two USB devices, not one. If I picked the wrong one, BIOS would look at U3, skip past it, and boot from the default device.
Took the Cruzer back to the store and exchanged it for a PNY Micro-Attache, which has no applications installed and is seen as one device.
So the lesson is: pick a basic no-frills thumb drive that doesn't have any cutesy applications pre-installed.
I made the mistake of picking up a Sandisk Cruzer. It has an annoying application at the root of the drive called U3. U3 is an unnecessary geegaw designed to impress Windows users. In Linux it's a real annoyance. I tried formatting the drive with a GPartedLiveCD. GParted didn't see the U3 folder. It just saw a big old fat32 partition. I tried deleting the three files in the U3 folder but they wouldn't go away.
I was able to install Ubuntu on the Cruzer. But at the BIOS "quick-boot" menu the Cruzer was seen as two USB devices, not one. If I picked the wrong one, BIOS would look at U3, skip past it, and boot from the default device.
Took the Cruzer back to the store and exchanged it for a PNY Micro-Attache, which has no applications installed and is seen as one device.
So the lesson is: pick a basic no-frills thumb drive that doesn't have any cutesy applications pre-installed.