"clickfree" USB HDD

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 11:31:37AM -0700, Tyler Aviss wrote:
> We recently got some of these at work. When they're plugged in, they
> show up with a small "47mb" filesystem with the software that autoruns
> in windows, as well as a regular drive.
> The small filesystem appears to show as a ISO9660 drive (fake CD-ROM
> drive?). I'm guessing that it's just a little bit of flash memory,
> perhaps an embedded SD card or something similar.
> 
> If it's a ROM chip I'm guessing it can't be changed. Alternately,
> anyone know of a way I might overwrite that little area of flash drive
> with something useful (like a rescue image)?

My sandisk usb key did that.  Part of its U3 feature.  They had a program
available that you could run (on windows) that disabled that feature.
It simply used a part of the flash space to store the readonly bit,
so turning the stupid feature off simple freed a bit of space for the
rest of the usb key and made it work normally.

The U3 thing is meant to handle special applications that run from the
usb drive and store all settings there, so intended to run secure firefox
versions with custom settings on public PCs and such.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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