Making Debian ignore a drive

Michael ODonnell michael.odonnell at comcast.net
Wed Apr 11 11:36:32 EDT 2007



I've forgotten the details but there's a trick called
U3 being employed by some USB Flash drive mfrs where
part of the Flash memory is treated as read-only and
presented by the USB interface as (warning: incorrect
USB nomenclature ahead) a CDROM-type storage-class device
while the remainder of the Flash memory is presented as
a separate read-write storage-class device.

 [ I know that some people find U3 to be useful but IMO
   it sucks for many reasons, and in at least one case
   I discovered that Windows launch-on-device-detection
   behavior was being exploited to execute an ancient
   bug-ridden copy of Internet Exploder from that CDROM
   "partition", which then rushed off and started loading
   pages from various WWW sites that I would not have
   visited if given a choice in the matter...           ]

On at least one Debian box I found that the U3 CDROM
"partition" was presented as /dev/scd0 while on other
systems it was not detected, or else was presented as
something like /dev/sda.  Maybe that's the basis of the
troubles you're enjoying?  In any case, I believe it's
true that USB storage-class devices are always presented
via the SCSI midlayer so removing/disabling the SCSI module
from your kernel altogether is probably not a good idea.
 


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list