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

Sun Jun 14 06:29:17 UTC 2009
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

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.)

Thanks.

mhr