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.
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