HDD with CDFS partition

[peterk10]

I have an Asus USB3 portable drive. The 500gb drive is a Toshiba MQ01 ADB050. The drive has a 55mb partition formatted as a CD (CDFS). Plug the drive into a W8 pc USB3 port and the "CD" wants to run . I've managed to get rid of the CDFS format its now RAW. The problem is that because the partition is a "CD" nothing will touch it.

Any suggestions please

[deftrue]

55 MB is not that much to be worried about. However, if you want to get rid of it and don't have important data on the rest of the drive (i.e. you can experiment with the drive), you have to use some tool to delete the MBR or GPT partition table/s, and reformat the drive. An easy way to do it also is to use a low-level format tool.

By the way, are you sure those 55 MB are stored in the disk platters? Maybe there's a flash partition somewhere...

[fzabkar]

It sounds like the firmware in your enclosure may be hiding 55MB of user area at the end of the drive and reserving it for a Virtual CD (VCD). If this is the case, then there will be nothing you can do unless you find some way to modify the bridge firmware. BTW, what are the markings on the largest IC on the USB-SATA bridge board?

[peterk10]

Yes it is in the firmware. It's an asmedia AS1051. Since my post I've located the flashing tool( a v1.? and v2.02) the problem I've now got is identification of the latest firmware - the numbering isn't clear.

I'd happily give away 50gb to get rid of this problem - every 15 seconds it mounts/dismounts. I've edit the group policies for autorun but it has a mind of its own.

[fzabkar]

I don't know how the firmware determines the location of the VCD, but if the LBA is hard coded, then you try to cut the capacity of the HDD with a HPA. You would need to determine the total LBAs reported via USB, and then limit the capacity reported via SATA to this same value. You could use a tool such as HDAT2 for this purpose.

That said, I suspect that the bridge firmware may locate the VCD by counting back a fixed number of sectors from the drive's max reported LBA, in which case the above procedure won't work.