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

From: MHR <mhullrich at 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