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