Comments on: Flash Drive Warning: U3 drives=Not so Smart

By: Denis

Denis — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:29:45 +0000

It is better to use some portable utility which leavy no traces of usage on your computer or drive.

There are one free software BDV SecretFolder which can hide a folder on USB Flash Drive. It is safe, because you do not need anything to be installed, and hidden folder are really invisible under DOS, Windows Linux etc.

Check it here: http://www.bdvnotepad.com/secretfolder_en.htm

By: jimmy

jimmy — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:02:18 +0000

Luckily my flash drives suffice so I don’t have to use any u3 drive.

By: Ace

Ace — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:31:48 +0000

I have a 2GB U3 flash drive, have exceeded the password tries (actually my wife did), not able to find any program or information on how to recover the data, everything I find says I have to lose it all and start over. Is that correct? it is hopeless? Thanks in advance for your reply.

By: John

John — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:51:14 +0000

I just read the article and sounds to me like you have a personal issue with U3.
Just because it doesn’t work in your case (or you lack the intelligence to make it work) doesn’t mean you should go crap on a perfectly good product.
Offcourse since you try to make it work on a campus computer it probably never hit your tiny mind that the computer in question might have security restrictions in place that prevent the U3 menu from launching (and yes… even other autorun menu’s and software from other vendors (like portableapps).
Does this mean the flashdrive is at fault ? absolutely not.
Is the security of the computer at fault ? probably not.
Some things in life have to be accepted. So either accept it doesn’t work on those computers or start bitching at the security department to make a security hole in their network just so you can be a happy U3 user. Offcourse if you do… be sure to act like you have a pair and accept the responsibility when your campus network suddenly happens to appear on the public internet !

Sounds more like a case of BNC (Brain Not Connected) on the user end !

By: Gerry

Gerry — Mon, 18 May 2009 16:27:35 +0000

It’s a shame you never thought to look in the “My Computer” and disbale the autorun to begin with. Furthermore, if you are so tech savvy, you could go to hardware manager and reassign the drive letter if it was not showing up in the directory which is probably from having the first available drive letter previously assigned to another drive.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:55:50 +0000

This didn’t help much. What happens if it says “USB NOT RECONIZED?”What do I do?

By: karan k

karan k — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:21:30 +0000

Thanks a lot. This was very helpful. Finally I can use it

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:49:59 +0000

You’re stupid for buying it without looking at it in depth, but that doesn’t matter. There are many pros to the u3 program, and there are a few cons. A lot of people like the u3 program, and it is even customizable if you know just a little bit about coding. You can set it to where it won’t auto run, and when you first plug it in you can erase the u3 program and use it as a normal flash drive. 1) Its not even a bad thing, and 2) You can easily remove it. Its not that hard. I guess the point of my comment is, you’re pretty stupid.

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:04:10 +0000

Thank you!!! I have a 4GB model and the dang thing would only ever show up as a 1.3 GB, I couldn’t repartition and format didn’t help at all!! I downloaded the uninstall program and it worked, and now it shows as a standard 4GB like I wanted! THANK YOU. I haven’t found ANYWHERE else online that helped me, and I’ve been looking awhile. I’m a tech, so It was pretty important to me to get the full volume of this drive.

By: Vincent

Vincent — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:37:09 +0000

Hahah, well I just had a good time reading this full blog.

I have a 2gb Memorex travel drive, I’m almost absolutely positive it’s software is 1.0 (non fixable version) of U3. I purchased it about 2-3 years ago, for about 50 dollars. Waste of money I say, but hey the packaging convinced me to try it out, I’ll have to buy a smaller size one some time and check if it’s been upgraded to fix our needs (likely not [yet, for those of you that are still hopeful of this crappy cd drive emulator])

I got that 2gb drive because I didn’t have my own computer, and my parents very much disliked me putting my personal files onto their computer. I tried the original ones, on several different operating systems, other than unix, or unix-like/linux. The os’s I have tried includes :Windows 98, Windows me, Windows xp (sp1 and sp2) Vista home basic, and home premium. and Mac OSX 10.5.1~5.

At first, I really did think it was a cool idea to have programs pre-installed on my new flashdrive, but then I discovered that most of the features didn’t even work. The only os, I had the most functionality out of, was win xp sp2. And even then, I was not even remotely impressed. At most, all it proved to be was a mere nuisance to my uses.

Later on though, i discovered what this u3 actually was, a cd drive being emulated… but with a 6 mb capacity… psh, that’s worthless. If u3 comes up with a larger capacity of this emulated drive, that’d be pretty cool.. for laptop purposes… but even then.. if you have a laptop, you can just emulate a disc onto your computer with other software such as alcohol 52, or 120. (the only useful thing I saw of this cd drive emulation, was battery conservation for my laptop… but even now, this u3 junk seems obsolete.)

I tried to kill u3 many times, by plugging it into a mac machine, and deleting all the u3 files, and leaving them in the trash, and permanently deleting them from the trash… both times, the u3 just seems to revive itself.. it should be u3 cockroach… never dies.

Nevertheless, i purchased a hp 2gb flashdrive, to replace the annoyance this u3 has caused me. but i’m still taking advantage of this old u3 drive. USE IT AS A READYBOOST DEVICE FOR WINDOWS VISTA…. atleast i don’t have to use my more worthwhile flashdrives to be ruined, I can just use my old flash drives for readyboost.

Atleast the original u3 drives don’t autorun the .exe on vista, so I can actually treat it like a true flash drive…. that has now been considered obsolete in my mind.