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, and look for the U3 logo on the drive casing) 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.
I have my U3 drive full of Sysinternals tools and a text file with my contact details incase I ever lose my drive.
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!
blog comments powered by Disqus