How can I make a USB flash drive appear/not appear as a CD drive?
I have a 2GB flash drive that was a freebie giveaway at some HP event. The drive works fine, except that the HP guys formatted it in such a way that one portion is 17.2MB of CDFS, and the rest is free fore me to use. It's obviously not a CD drive, but their formatting it as such allows them to ensure that their propagandish applications and "buy our products"s not be deleted.
Obviously, I want to delete them.
Windows seems to be pretty much impassive to all my attempts. I've tried using
format F:, but the command prompt refuses to format because the "
volume is write protected." Windows Explorer seems to actually think that it's a CD drive, as it has a context menu entry for "Close Tray" (which of course does nothing. Windows's "Disk Management" service won't let me format it, either.
Linux's (Mint, specifically, though I don't suppose that it matters)
gparted only recognize the user-writable portion of the disk (the non-CDFS portion). They allow me to manipulate it - I've tried creating a new partition table - but it doesn't affect the CDFS portion. Linux's
nautilus (roughly equivalent to Windows Explorer, in case you don't know) does not recognize the offending partition.
In case anyone happens to have this exact drive and they figured it out: The drive has a lightly brushed aluminum chassis with a cut for a keychain, etc. on one end. The internal workings of the drive are contained by what appears to be either aluminum or steel, and is covered with leather, in which the HP logo is engraved. A stitched leather strap with a brushed aluminum cap is attached with a ~1/4" flathead screw.
As mentioned before, the drive is otherwise in perfect working order.