16GB / 32GB (USB) problem – SanDisk Cruzer or Any other USB Drive

I’ve just bought a SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive with 16 GB of capacity. It’s quite fancy in many ways, looks slick, nifty little slider to park the connector, shiny little red light, fantastic U3 applications that I’ll never use, … Which is all well, but in regards to its primary function which is data storage I’m finding it absolutely appalling.

The reason I bought such a big USB drive in the first place was because I needed to store an 8 gigabyte file on it, and when I try to transfer this file over it tells me that the disk is full. It’s not full, as a matter of fact it’s completely empty with windows seeing and recognizing 14.9 gigabytes of free space on it.

At first I thought it might be all that U3 junk on it so I formatted the drive: no difference. I reinstalled all the U3 jazz and started looking for a file transfer section or a write protect option somewhere, no luck. So I’ve reformatted the drive again since I’m not interested in any of the U3 utilities. I just want a functional 16 (or 14.9) GBs worth of storage on this USB drive.

The most I’ve been successful in copying has been 1.5 gigabytes. I’m running on XP SP2. Here comes the tricky part to make this USB drive to work with NTFS format system. This is not useful with Grey market items! Files larger than 4GB cannot be stored on FAT32 volume. Formatting the flash drive as NTFS will resolve this issue.

STEP 1 – Optimize the flash drive for performance
1. Plug in the device to the PC.
2. Double-click My Computer.
3. Right-click on the flash drive, then select Properties.
4. Click the Hardware tab.
5. Select the SanDisk Cruzer USB Device disk drive, then click Properties.
6. Click the Policies tab.
7. Select Optimize for performance, then click OK.

STEP 2 – Format the flash drive
1. Double-click My Computer.
2. Right-click on the flash drive, then select Format.
3. In the File system list, click NTFS.
4. Click Start.
5. Click OK to start formatting.

Next comes the U3 issue. Some of the USB drive makers embed U3 software which is a hassle for advance users. This software acts very intelligently like a Trojan!
It is ok for novice who just want to backup the way the software works. If you like to get rid of it, you need to download the uninstaller which does the work. Formatting the stick does not get rid of it entirely.

If you click (in Windows XP) Start then Run then type COMPMGMT.MSC, click OK, then click Disk Management from the window that appears, you’ll notice there are two partitions on the stick, one of which is a CDFS system labeled “U3 System”.

Try as you might, there’s no way to get rid of it from there.

There are two ways to get rid of this stupid thing to reclaim the space.

First method: Load the stick in Linux and use your partition software o’ choice (like GParted) to remove it.

Second method: Use the U3 uninstaller program for Windows. Just click the “Remove U3″ link there to download the program, then run it to completely format the stick to reclaim all the space back. Help comes from the U3 support site.

Most U3 smart drives come with an uninstall utility that converts the U3 smart drive into a regular USB flash drive. This utility can be accessed from the U3 Launchpad. Open the U3 Launchpad and click on Settings, then select U3 Launchpad Settings and click on the Uninstall tab. Some devices have a link to the Uninstall utility under Help and Support.

For full support page visit http://u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3