usb 2.0 - 1 TB ext HD $78, 8 GB flash drive $14

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 Have any Geeks on your Christmas shopping list this year? You can pick these up at WalMart, all day today; well, as long as supplies last.

• SanDisk Cruzer USB 2.0 flash drive 8 GB $14
   
• Western Digital My Book USB 2.0 external hard drive 1 TB/To $78

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 Naturally, I bought one of each.

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 Warning: There is U3™ technology on this flash drive! It won't work on Linux, but does mount the drive twice which is annoying. People have written online how it has caused them some grief on µSoft boxes.

 I decided to remove it, and it wasn't easy at first.

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 When mounted in Linux, the USB flash has two icons on the system "tray".

  1) External CD-R drive
  2) SanDisk U3 cruzer micro

 If I ignore the CD-R stuff it seems to work ok as a flash drive.

 There was no U3 uninstall on my Cruzer, so I found the following
site with an appropriate title,

http://www.geekyjock.com/pages/blog/200 ... flash.html

 At the end of the article is a link to a little piece of free software
that works to remove U3 partition etc. Like the article suggests
it is copywritten by the folks at Best Buys Geek Squad.

 WARNING!
DO NOT USE THEIR SOFTWARE! It will remove the U3 partition,
but it will leave you with only a 4 GB flash drive.

 I used it and was sorry. For 3 hours I tried to remedy this ½ capacity problem
to no avail.

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 Finally, I stumbled across u3.com, where I read
 

If you can not find the uninstall utility on your U3 smart drive you can download it from the following locations:
Remove U3 (for Windows)
U3 removal tool for MAC

 I downloaded the software and moved it to my laptop now running XP. I plugged in my reduced capacity, 4 of 8 GB, flash drive and wondered if it would 'correct it' now that I had previously removed (in a faulty manner) the U3 technology from it.

 Well … it did work and left me with 7.5 GB of usable space. The loss of 0.5 GB is typical for these drives.

NOTE: a µSoft box is a handy thing to have laying around.

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 I'm seeing now only 4 GB drives in the stores commanding $14-15.

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 The above hard drive is available online from WalMart for $89.00 + 97¢ shipping to home.

                   See

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 Got'a love robots reading my thread title ...

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 On the shelves, I'm still seeing flash drives of only 4 GB capacity commanding $14US and up.