My Goodness! I thought I was reading my own post - even though I'm doing that now. I've preferred SanDisk for years as a professional and am amazed that you would stoop to this kind of tactic. I plugged this 8M Cruzer into my main XP machine only to cringe as I watched helplessly while your software forcibly installed itself onto my hard drive! How dare you!? I needed a large capacity removable storage device to relocate bulk files. Instead I'm cast into the idiot abyss of "oooh gee - It's FREEE!" junk software against my will. But here's the best part, and what prompted me to join your forum and put up this post.

After being completely angry that you would violate a trust like this, I deleted the "u3" software from the 8M Cruzer to be sure it wouldn't mess with my Vista laptop. Double checked and verified there are no hidden files, no surprises that would (and on Vista you can be sure they will) give me grief later. Empty. Upstairs to the laptop, and sure enough I pop the Cruzer into a USB port and VOILA! The software starts installing itself AGAIN. Populating my registry and dirtying up my machine for who knows what problems that will pop up later. Scratching my head, I checked the thumb drive and there it is! All the files I removed are now listed. Not only are they listed, they are inaccessible and I cannot find any way to delete them! Firmware? XP still shows empty so it's probably a Vista thing you've exploited, but who cares. HOW DARE YOU!? These machines DO NOT belong to SanDisk and I DO NOT want you loading your junk onto my machines! Who knows what incompatibilities you will spawn down the road with your forced violation of my system?

I've had to deal with crappy 'FREE' software like the Apple Quicktime video malware and Adobe's Acrobat loading their FNPLicence tracker that runs in the background sending data to their main system, and it's been a royal headache. Anyone who has used it installed can attest Adobe's FNP automatically installs and connects to their home server while monitoring the goings on on the machine. This causes a huge slowdown on the processor and the only way to correct it is to reboot or kill the process (which the common man won't know how to do). [For those interested the gleaned information can be used for any purpose including selling your software preferences and private internet activity data to the highest bidder (oh no! WE don't do that!).]

You can't force people to like you, and you can't force them to accept intrusions and violations of trust like this. I now have to trash this thumb drive to avoid installing your junk onto every other machine that I need to service. It's a business responsibility, obviously something SanDisk is not familiar with. As far as I'm concerned SanDisk has dropped to the bottom of the list of memory considerations and any future purchases.

Bad move Sandisk. The word will get around.

Amen Brother. I am pissed at SanDisk too. Must every piece of hardware these days be designed for the clueless? I just want a drive with storage. Not a bunch of crap software that gets installed whether I want it or not. And the removal tool is a joke. It keeps saying insert your SanDisk. Well the SanDisk is inserted and I'm looking at the U3Launcher.exe file right now. Do you think the uninstall program would recognize it. NO!

No more SanDisk for me. I'll stick to vendors that manufacture quality products like Kingston.

So… if anyone REALLY knows how to remove this U3 garbage, please let me know. If I don’t have it removed by the end of this month (January 09), then someone is going to get a free 8GB piece of crap SanDisk drive compliments of ME since I will never use this company or product again.

Oh… and everyone please remember to post your situation on newegg.com and tigerdirect.com so other people don’t get stuck with this junk.

if the removal failed the data should still be on your harddrive.

if you are using xp the backup location is in the following path. (application data is a hidden folder so you will need to set the computer to show hidden files and folders.)

C:\Documents and Settings\"your user name"\Application Data\U3\temp

if vista (app data is hidded so set to show hidden files and folders)

C:\users\"your user name"\app data\roming\u3\temp

I am also going to put the 8GB cruzer I bought into the drawer until someone figures out how to get rid of the U3 partition. I tried using the un-install proogram on the flash drive, it didn't work, so I downloaded the un-install program from sandisk. It removed the U3 partition, but as soon as it did, the drive reinstalled itself on my PC.

You guys at sandisk need to get this corrected. I registered the device only because I hope to get an e-mail some day saying you have a new program to remove the U3 partition for good.

hi guys, instead of making a new post i thought i'd go ahead and post here since drlucky is actively responding and my question is closely related to the topic.

basicly i want to make my 4g cruzer micro a little micro linux OS that i can whimsically plug in to any pc and play around with. I have many OS' on different pcs around here to choose from to accomplish this, however i think i'm uninformed about a step or two and would like some help.

I've read there are 2 partitions on the drive. I fire up parted magic and it recognizes one 3.8G parition and one 6MB unallocated space. Is this unallocated space truly a partition unrecognized by parted magic? it seems to me that since windows reports a 5MB CDFS system volume that the U3 software loads some sort of java file that mounts the drive's system files as the CDFS volume.

anyway(and this is without running the u3 uninstaller) it seemed to me that I should be able to set the 3.8GB partition as active, copy some old dos 6.2 system files to the root and reboot and as long as my bios supports dos emulation(it does and a few different usb boot types), it should boot to dos(not bothering with linux at this stage yet). it didn't boot from the cruzer micro.

so let's assume that my bios does support booting from it. starting from the top down, will i need to run the lp uninstaller, repartition the drive, format with system files, and i'm golden, or should i be able to perform the actions i have already and boot, or will i (from your expert experience) need to install a boot manager on the given machine's primary boot device in order to boot from the cruzer?

thanks for any advice.

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frankc9521 wrote:

I am also going to put the 8GB cruzer I bought into the drawer until someone figures out how to get rid of the U3 partition. I tried using the un-install proogram on the flash drive, it didn't work, so I downloaded the un-install program from sandisk. It removed the U3 partition, but as soon as it did, the drive reinstalled itself on my PC.

You guys at sandisk need to get this corrected. I registered the device only because I hope to get an e-mail some day saying you have a new program to remove the U3 partition for good.

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I managed to get rid of U3 today after many tries.  I rebooted my Windows XP laptop into "Safe Mode" (hit F8 a few times while rebooting) since I had been getting messages that I couldn't delete it using the deletion tool since something (?) was running.  Couldn't tell what that something was.  Going into Safe Mode and then using Administrator role, I first ran the U3 software, and then from within it -- using the option to delete the software and reformat -- AT LAST -- it's gone!  I now have a full 16 GB available.  I hope that helps.  It worked like a charm.  When done, just reboot normally and if it works for you like it did for me, you'll have one partition with the full capacity.  Good luck to you.

I thought I'd weigh in on this thread.......................

I could not take jpegs to my local photo kyosk to print some pictures.  The kyosk would not let me switch to the non-U3 partition so I was unable to access the files to print.  Therefore, I wanted to remove the U3 and just make the drive into one partition.  Unfortunately, I didn't come here first to read up on how to do it.  

I Used Easygig II to try and delete the offending partition.  Somehow I managed to not delete the partition and instead ended up with a partition that thought it was a cd drive.

After checking out things here, all I had to do, with Vista Home Premium, was to download the removal tool and then run it as an administrator.   I did it twice, once for each of my two Cruzer 4 gig drives. 

Everything went smoothly.  Several days and a few reboots unrelated to this issue, things are fine.  Each drive shows up as just one drive.  I imagine the key is to run the removal tool as an administrator.  Thanks for the good advice.  I'm happy now.

Just bought a new 8GB Cruzer.

Using Win XP - realized immediately that U3 must be removed. Donloaded the removal tool. It started the formatting... it was doing that for 10 minutes. It was on a loop. I thought that killing the process MIGHT do no harm. Well it did !!! Now I have have one brand new sandisk which never had any file in it. F...ck. This was my last Sandisk product. 

Any idea how to make it live ???

TH