Thursday, April 23, 2009
U3 Drive Hacking
Right, I've been meaning to write about this for ages! One of my U3 drives has a custom partition full of various Sysinternals and other handy Windows based utilities. This is good, because most AV programs flip out when they see Nirsoft's Password revealer software and since it's on a read-only partition; they can't do anything about it! :)
If you have a U3 capable drive (most of the recent Sandisk drives have it these days) then head over to Hak5 and get your hack on! This guide will also rid you of the pesky U3 autostart crap that appears everytime you plug the drive in.
Following on, I attempted to try something a little bit different: Copy a bootable iso directly over to a (normal, non U3) USB key using DD. The results were interesting!
I used DD to copy an XP Pro OEM ISO image file to a memory stick. The resulting flash drive was recognized in Ubuntu and I could browse the discs file system
Windows Server 2008 refused to read the drive at all. Allegedly, it was not formatted. I contend that Windows just wasn't trying hard enough!
Obviously, Windows doesn't like reading ISO 9660 file systems on USB media. Perhaps there is a way around it. It'd be kinda cool if there was? I'll have to keep looking!
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
USB Mount Points in Ubuntu (and Gnome)
So I saw you can manually set the mount point for a USB drive in gnome. Great! That's handy! Not so fast.. See, in the box below I entered "/media/cruzer4" rather than just cruzer4. Ooops! This causes the mount to fail when you next plug the stick in, and worse still: You can't get back to the properties screen to fix it! What to do? It's actually quite simple!
- Press Alt+F2 or open a terminal
- Type "gconf-editor"
- Navigate to /system/storage/volumes/ and locate your specific drive as per the screenshot
- Now change the value of "mount_point" to "cruzer4" instead of "/media/cruzer4" and you're good to go!
The drive should now be mountable again!
