Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I went out and bought a 1GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro drive yesterday from Best Buy for $49.99. The drive itself is cute enough, feels solid, and is amazingly small for 1GB, at least when I consider how things have changed in the past 10 years. Regardless of how great the thing is on the outside it totally sucks on the inside. I plugged the thing in and it went through the normal deal of detecting the device. But what's this it detected two devices. One being the normal disk drive and the other being a 4MB CD-ROM device <argh>. Immediately I set out to get rid of this U3 junk, especially since I didn't even realize the thing came with it and didn't know what it was before I bought it. USB Flash devices aren't exactly something I'm wildly excited to read about in the news.

That's where the problems started. First off, you can't just format it, you can't format a CDROM. And because it actually appears as two devices in Windows you can't just remove the partitions and all that. So I tried the Ultimate Boot CD and tried wiping it that way, argh, the volume is write protected. I tried examining it at a lower level and wiping it that way. Still nothing.

So at this point I've given up, I think the only solution is for SanDisk to release a tool that will recognize the device, update whatever firmware there is and reflash the piece of crap. I've tried finding a geeks tool to do this but haven't been successful and am too annoyed to continue.

At this point I only have one piece of advice. Look for the U3 logo on any flash drive you buy and avoid it. It's totally useless, you can't remove it from the drive and get whatever space it's taking up back. This 1GB SanDisk only has 973MB available after formatting with FAT32. Yuck.

UPDATE: I finally remembered to look it up and finally found the U3_Uninstaller.exe app that's needed to remove the U3 stuff. Looks like it's from the Best Buy Geek Squad instead of coming from U3 or SanDisk (who still don't have it up). It was a bit odd on first run complaining about too many devices but unplugging and replugging in the device reset it. Rather than hosting the file dubiously here are the links to the places that might have the file...

Arstechnica Forums
U3 Community Forums
NeoWin Forums

But it's at least that U3 junk is gone from the device. Annoyingly the device still only reports 973MB total and it doesn't look like I can recover anything further.

I'm going to say it now. Mark my words. Vista and beyond, what's going to make and break it for people is the ease with which metadata is assigned to their files and work.

Why am I throwing this idea out into the open now? Well, I just finished indexing my 30,000th file through Windows Media Information Services (WMIS) to get metadata into my MP3's and WMA's via WMP. It wasn't the easiest experience to say the least. I'm not even halfway done.

Oh and I haven't even started putting lyrics data into the tracks either. That's a process that's just too daunting to even begin at this point.

I've got over 30,000 photos as well that are totally void of metadata. The only thing they have going for them is that they're in some sort of decent folder structure and still have the emedded EXIF data from my Canon 20D. Other than that they lack any details about the people in the photos, the location of the photos, the objects in the photos, or any other information one would hope to have.

So with the way we interact with digital media going into Vista and beyond totally changing there's a real need to improve the way we interact with and really start using metadata. Things are changing a bit inside Microsoft that's for sure. If you're in any way involved with building software for digital media now would be a darn good time to investigate what Microsoft is doing moving forward and start adopting some of the same practices and developing some new practices of your own to take advantage of the metadata boom in the next three to five years.

But hey, who am I? Well I'm just ahead of the average consumer by a couple years and I'm already asking for things to improve...