The U3 software that everybody so loathes is somewhat hacker technology. It’s not entirely unlike the Sony rootkit, except it (as far as I know) by default doesn’t install persistently.

Fortunately, it doesn’t work on Linux.

What U3 essentially does is the following:

  • For security reasons, Windows doesn’t do auto-run on USB disks (which is good!)
  • To overcome this limitation, U3 emulates a CD drive in addition to the actual USB disk (Hack #1)
  • To make this work, U3 reserves part of the Flash disk that you cannot write to (Hack #2)

It probably is just a matter of time until the first viruses find out how to install themselves onto the U3 partition and get auto-run whenever you plug in such a stick.

So if you plan to buy a USB pen drive, make sure it doesn’t bear the U3 logo. If you end up with such a hack-drive, grab the Uninstall application from U3, which unfortunately is Windows and Mac only. If anyone found a way to erase the U3 partition on Linux, please share. A low-level format on the usb-storage device is not sufficient.