Sorry, this is waaaaaaaaaaay off-topic, but I wondered if any of the USB experts might happen to know:
I was at the UK Embedded Systems Show the other day, and got a free USB stick from Farnell. When plugged-in, this shows up as two drives: 1. A CD-ROM drive, which has an auto-play promotional movie on it; 2. A "normal" USB drive.
The trouble is, every time you plug it in, it tries to play the movie again!
:-(
Win-XP says the CD-ROM part is read-only, so won't let me delete the files or format it.
So, is there any way to get rid of this movie? Or do I just junk the whole stick?
The problem isn't the USB stick, it's that the Autorun feature of Windows is enabled for this type of drive. Or, as I'd put it personally, the problem is that Windows actually has an Autorun feature.
My (drastic) solution is to use regedit to search the registry for all instances of NoDriveTypeAutorun and set the value of each occurrent to 0x255 to get rid of Windows trying to run files, play movies, etc, without being explicitly told to do so.
If you value the Autorun feature, I would recommend a more surgical approach. Microsoft probably has an explanation somewhere on their website what the bits of NoDriveTypeAutorun stand for, and how to disable Autorun for the type of drive only.
Or, as I'd put it personally, the problem is that Windows actually has an Autorun feature.
(I consider this an intentional defect in the product). ;)
Do you have any tools that can rewrite the MBR and the Partition Table?
Is it likely that this is being done in the MBR and/or Partition table, or is it the device firmware that is enumerating on the USB as two separate "drives"...?
I have looked at it with the Win-XP disk management tools, and that shows it as two completely separate devices - not one device with 2 partitions: The 'Delete Partition' option is greyed-out on both devices; The 'Format' option is greyed-out on the devices that appears as a CD-ROM (it is formatted as "CDFS").
The partition tools provided by Microsoft are not good. I think that, it is because Microsoft wants to protect its OS. You need to find a good partition tool to erase the CDFS.
Can't find any good links for you, But you can try the keywords "Remove CDFS".
The below link says:
I had the same problem, I used Gparted on a Linux Live CD. I used Puppy Linux and re-formatted both to FAT32 so I have 2 partitions to use now.
www.pcadvisor.co.uk/.../index.cfm
In my experiances, most Linux distributions provide good partition tools.
For Windows Environment, you can try SPFDisk.
spfdisk.sourceforge.net/
It is designed by a Taiwanese engineer, not easy to find a good English Documentation.
Before messing with searching for Partition-management tools, the basic question needs to be answered: "Is it likely that this is being done in the MBR and/or Partition table?"
If it isn't a "Partition" - but a firmware thing - then no Partition-management tools are going to help!
"Definitely - it's only a 512MB stick!"
Andy, don't you think you're taking recycling a little too far?
I would be surprised if it is done with partitions. Sounds more like a firmware feature.
If you have a proper partition tools, it will be very easy to examine that.
Why do you think I replied, "Definitely", to the suggestion, "in terms of return on investment, it'd be an almost certain disaster"...?!
;-)
You missed my point: if it's not likely to be the MBR and/or Partition Table, then there is no point in trying to find "proper partition tools" - is there?!
:-)
For me, I just need to restart my desktop, boot into Ubuntu Linux, I don't need to find anything, so it only takes several minutes to me. But trying to find some software, scan viruses, read documentation, it realy takes too much time.
I always keep a CD with gparted for handling repairs, migration to larger disks etc. It has partition editor etc.
Andy,
you would be better to find an expert cracker, than a USB expert ;-)
I can make up such a USB stick for you within 30 min, modifying KEIL example to support multiple LUNs. But I don't know how to crack your stick, other than with a hammer :-)
Tsuneo