I bought a new 1 GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro flash drive recently.

When I got to the store that had advertised the drive, they were nowhere to be found. When I asked about it, they had some “in the back.” If the store had actually had the items on the shelf, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised by the U3 Launcher that tried to install software when I inserted the flash drive into my computer.

I had just been reading back issues of Brian Livingston’s Windows Secrets newsletter — where he had the exact same problem.

The Cruzer Micro was actually formatted internally into two “drives”: one non-writeable “CDROM” drive (that’s the icon that Windows showed for it) and one writeable flash drive. In other words, SanDisk had grabbed a chunk of my flash drive’s memory, written auto-running software to it, and then made that portion of the drive non-writeable.

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