From: MHR mhullrich@gmail.com
I just got a new SanDisk 8GB flash drive, and, as usual, it came with the U3 software (for Windoze) on a "CD" partition and considerably less than 8GB on the disk partition. I put it into my WinXP portable and told U3 to delete itself, but I still can't get at the old U3 part of the drive. I've tried WinXP's format command, disk management and CentOS's fdisk, and nothing will give me more than 7,872,512 bytes per cylinder, times 1019 cylinders yields 8,022,089,728 bytes. Is that right, or should there be more? fdisk also reports that the drive has 8029 "MB", or 8029470208 bytes, which is 7,380,480 bytes difference (until it gets allocated into the 8,022,089,728 bytes of the partition) - I'm thinking this is a standard formatting loss.
Maybe there is some reserved "good sectors" space in order to handle (take the place of) bad sectors? I don't really know how bad-sectors handling works...
JD