Ok, so I pick up one of the SanDisk 4 gig micro Cruzers on sale for half off that's been making the rounds at all the stores lately. I remember from the last time I bought one, it had the U3 crap on there with the separate mock cd-rom partition that can't be deleted, but yet you can… somehow. Anyways, I couldn't remember how I did it before, and this time around, nothing was working, not even the official uninstaller running under Windows. However, an hour later, I finally figured out my flaw.

In my haste to use it and attempt to recover the partition, I formatted the main partition HFS+ and tried to resize it and nuke the phantom one under Disk Utility. Admitting defeat and booting into Windows to use the official uninstaller, I figured that was no big deal since it would be able to see the drive, but just not use it. Well, apparently that was the mistake because not even the U3 crap would work and kept telling me no flash drive was connected. After pounding the Google searches for a reason why, I decided to load it back up on OS X and repartitioned with MBR and FAT32 for the main partition. Upon dropping back into Windows, lo and behold, the autorun crap started and the uninstaller saw it. A minute later, we finally have one uninterrupted partition.

Why can't anyone just sell some hardware without “value-added” junk thrown in?