On 2020-12-08 07:29, Fred wrote:
Hello,I bought a SanDisk Cruzer Glide USB stick. The fine print on the package says it has SecureAccess software. It is so secure it prevents me from writing to it without running the included Bill Gates cancerous, virus infested, scourge of the Earth software.fred@ragnok:/media/usb0$ ls -l total 8416 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Jul 9 2018 SanDiskSecureAccess-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8600360 Nov 4 2016 SanDiskSecureAccessV3.01_win.exefred@ragnok:/media/usb0$
I have many SanDisk USB flash drives, including several Cruzer Glide. They typically have an MBR partition scheme and one large VFAT or NTFS partition.
"SanDisk Secure Access" is optional Windows encryption software that is bundled with SanDisk USB flash drives. Use it, ignore it, or delete it as you please; the software is not required to use the drive on any computer that supports the factory partitioning scheme and filesystem.
root@ragnok:/home/fred# chown fred /media/usb0 chown: changing ownership of '/media/usb0': Operation not permitted Attempts to add write permission are also denied.
As you have not stated how you mounted the drive, I will assume that you plugged it in, an icon appeared on the desktop, you interacted with the icon, and the drive was mounted at /media/usb0. If so, AIUI the various Debian desktops with automounting use FUSE. The user account running the desktop and automounter will have whatever access controls that are supported by the filesystem and/or by FUSE. But all other user accounts, including the root account (!), are denied access to the filesystem. This is a security feature of FUSE. See mount.fuse(8).
Is there any way to disable or remove the SecureAccess software?
If you want to use the flash drive to move files between DOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, BSD, etc., leave the factory partitioning scheme and filesystem intact. Use the desktop to mount and unmount the filesystem on the flash drive. Use the file manager or a normal, non-root, terminal to delete or move aside the "Secure Access" stuff.
If you want to use the drive for some other purpose, such as burning a Debian Installer ISO image onto it, do not mount the drive using the desktop. (You may have to disable the desktop automounting feature). Instead, open a terminal and use sudo(8) or su(1) to work with the drive.
David