[CentOS] Trouble (?) reformatting flash drive to include former U3 partition

[MHR]

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 11:29 PM, MHR<mhullrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> Semi-OT?
>
> 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.
>
> My 4GB flash drive has 4,096,189,440 bytes on it, and twice that would
> be 8,192,378,880, which is a difference of 170,289,152 bytes, or about
> 162+MB.  The former "CD" partition (which is invisible, so far) only
> had 8,645,202 bytes used on it, which leaves a huge amount of room to
> spare of inaccessible empty space.
>
> What am I missing?  Or is that just the way it is?  (The package only
> says "Some capacity is not available for data storage."  That doesn't
> really tell me enough.)
>

By comparison, I also have a Kingston 8GB flash drive, with the U3
partition removed, and it shows 7916608 1k blocks (in df), whereas the
8GB Sandisk only shows 7818752 (so far).

Relevance uncertain....

mhr