Sandisk Cruzer Contour shows up as two USB boot devices in BIOS

Hi

Your ASUS board is newer than mine and may have additional features. I don't have a USB section. My Sandisk Cruzer 4GB appears in the bios as follows:

Boot Device Priority
Removable
Hard Disk Drives (SanDisk 7.01)
CDROM Drives (SanDisk 7.01)

This stick has virtual CD features and my guess is that's what all this is related to. This CDROM device also appears in the Windows device manager. Go into your device manager and expand "DVD/CD-ROM Drives" There should be one SanDisk device there. Now go to "Disk Drives" and there should be one SanDisk device there. If you have two SanDisk devices in either location then you have a problem. Personally I disable the device under "DVD/CD-ROM Drives", Alcohol 120% is the only virtual device I need.

You're absolutely right, I think the motherboard BIOS did detect one instance of the USB drive as a CD-ROM drive, and the other as a hard-disk, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me why it would do this, I was unsure if it was the motherboard or the USB drive with a potential problem. I came to the conclusion it must be the USB drive as the Kingston and older Sandisk Titanium doesn't do this.

The problem is under Boot devices in the BIOS, it lists two instances of Sandisk Cruzer Contour and I don't know which one to select, in fact it pushes out my WD hard-drive from the list because of this. The USB section I refer to allows you to define how the USB device is emulated, as a FDD, Hard-disk, CD-ROM drive, etc. In my case it lists two USB devices, as if I have two USB drives plugged in.

I'll check tomorrow morning in the device manager for DVD/CD drives, but what you're saying makes sense, I've never heard of this virtual CD feature of a USB drive before. Is there any way to disable this feature of the USB key?

Thanks for clearing this up!

I don't think there is anyway to disable it, its at the hardware level. It's very annoying because all I use it for is Readyboost. After a clean install of Windows I don't pop it in until I done installing my software so I don't cache a bunch of trash. Because of this stupid feature I have to reassign all my drives in Disk Management. Other than that I haven't had any problems with it, take care.

actually I believe his problem is with U3 that is installed in most SanDisk USB sticks. In some of there newer drives there is a uninstall utility that will remove the virtual CD-rom. I do believe you can find the uninstall utility online.

Ha, you're absolutely right.

As I type just now, I finished running the U3 Uninstall and formatting my USB drive to put a Windows installation on it. Apparently the U3 system gets allocated a special partition that cannot be removed even with a format. I found this >>here<<. The download for the uninstall utility is in that link, or if you prefer, directly on the U3 devices web-site which is >> here<<.

Thanks to both of you for your help.

I just finished removing mine to, PsyKhiqZero you are a star! It's gone, I also confirmed that it is no longer in the bios, thanks allot buddy for tip.

But why would you want to disable that? It allows you to auto-hack and download passwords with only about twenty lines of code. Best USB ever!