USB drive space

[Matt Graham]

>> On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 7:33 PM Daniel Stasinski 
>> <daniel at genericinbox.com> wrote:
>>> Today I got a promotional information USB stick from a retailer
On 2018-08-11 04:13, Aaron Jones wrote:
> You should throw it away. Unsolicited or free usb sticks are not safe.

Er.  I know salespeople aren't usually technically literate, but it is 
highly unlikely they're knowingly distributing malware, spyware, or 
electrical attack devices to potential customers.  Salespeople who 
actively hurt customers usually make very few sales and auto-Darwinate.

Also, the USB drive obviously wasn't an electrical attack device, and 
it wouldn't contain malware at all if Daniel had run mkfs on it.  It 
might've been a flash drive with a lot of bad cells.  It might've been a 
larger piece of flash memory where the controller chip was set to say 
"only make 8031 512-byte sectors visible".  Regardless, if the thing 
reports "my capacity is 8031 512-byte sectors" via the USB Mass Storage 
protocol, then that's all the kernel will let you use.  You may want to 
have a look at what dmesg says about this device, or check out the 
debugging options you can feed the usb_storage module--that may give you 
some additional info.

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