Now there are loads of tools to use for this purpose. I have already covered the Unetbootin tool in my article “Install Linux on a USB drive with Unetbootin.” This time around we are going to do the same trick with a tool that comes pre-installed on any modern Ubuntu distribution. It’s all graphical interface and all easy going.

What you will need

• A USB drive with at least 700 MB in size.
• Either an ISO image or the Ubuntu Live CD

And a little bit of time. If you don’t have either the ISO image or the CD you can just download a fresh copy from the Ubuntu site.

Once you have everything you need, you are ready to go.

Starting the tool

Figure 1

You will find the USB creator in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu on the GNOME desktop. The entry you are looking for is called “USB Startup Disk Creator”. Click that to open up the main window (see Figure 1).

As you can see (in Figure 1) there is neither an image or a CD listed. You either have to insert your Ubuntu CD or, if you’re using a downloaded image, click the Other button and navigate to where you’ve saed your image file.

When you insert your CD it will be automatically detected by the system and listed in the USB Startup Disk window. When this happens everything that is greyed out in Figure 1 will be at your service.

You will notice the only option available is for saving documents and settings. If your USB drive has enough extra space you can designate a portion of that drive for this purpose. With this feature you can effectively have a portable version of Linux that is far more than just a “startup disk”.

Creating the disk

Figure 2

When you have selected your image to use and configured your free space you are ready to go. Click the Make Startup Disk button and the main windo will be dismissed. During the creation process you will see a progress window (see Figure 2) that will let you know how much is done and what is happening. The phases of this creation are:

• Copying Files
• Creating persistence file
• Making persistence file system

Once all three phases are complete you will get a dialog window telling you installation is complete and you can now reboot your machine with the USB drive. Of course when you boot a machine with this device it has to be able to boot from a USB device. Most modern machine can do that so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Final thoughts

As far as tools of this nature, the Ubuntu USB disk creator tool is one of the easiest and most reliable. It’s not the most flexible; but for what it does, you can’t beat it. If you’re looking to have a portable Ubuntu distribution you can carry with you, make use of this user-friendly tool.

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Computer vaccination referring to disabling autorun completely from removable media like usb flash drives or optical drives like CDs or DVD drives. To enable the protection of the computer system from programs that are auto-executed if usb flash drives or CDs or DVDs are inserted into the computer drives.

A click on vaccinate computer will immediately disable autorun on the computer system. The USB drive vaccination option on the other hand will disable autorun from selected usb flash drives. The drives have to be connected to the computer system before the computer can be protected. Every connected usb flash drive will be listed in a pulldown menu. A click on vaccinate usb will prevent autorun from being executed from that usb flash drive.

It should be noted that it is not possible to undo the autorun protection of a selected usb flash drive in the computer system using the security software. Another limitation is that it will only work on usb flash drives that have been formatted with the FAT or FAT32 file system.

Panda Research USB Vaccine increases the security of a computer system in regards to usb flash drives and other media with autorun capabilities. The security software has been tested under Windows Vista, Windows XP and even Windows 2000. It will work on all

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Users who want to create multiple partitions need a file called Hitachi Microdrive which contains the new driver that we are going to modify first and install afterwards. Unpack the package to a new directory on the hard drive. The first step is to find out the exact name of the USB stick that we want to use that way. The information can be found in the Windows Registry. Pressing [Windows R], typing [regedit] and hitting [Enter] will load the Registry editor.

The information are located in subkeys of the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\USBSTOR. The name of the USB stick can be found by clicking on the [+] sign in front of the key. All USB devices should be listed there. The name of the USB stick can be copied by left-clicking the subkey, right-clicking afterwards and selecting Copy Key Name from the context menu.

The key needs to be modified because it contains the full path. The best way to do that is to paste the contents into a text editor and remove all chars before Disk&Ven.

Now that this is done we need to copy the part that is left into the Windows Clipboard again by selecting the text and pressing [CTRL C]

The driver information needs to be edited in the next step before the new drivers for the USB stick are installed. Load the file cfadisk.inf in an text editor and locate the [cfadisk_device] section.

Replace the chars IDE\DiskIBM-DSCM-11000__________________________SC2IC801 in the first line with the name of the USB stick that you are going to use. Remove every other line in the category so that only the line with our modified USB stick name is shown in there.

The driver is now prepared and can be installed for the USB stick. Open the Windows Control Panel, the System category and there the Hardware tab. A click on Device Manager will load the Windows Device Manager which lists the computer hardware. The USB stick should be located in the Disk Drives category. Right-click the USB stick and select Update Driver from the context menu.

The Hardware Update wizard should pop up. Select the option Install from a list or specific location in the window and click next.

Check the Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install option in the next window and click next again.

A click on Have Disk in the next window will open a file browser. Locate and pick the file cfadisk.inf that has been modified previously. Clicking on OK will check the driver and show a warning message that the driver is not digitally signed. Press next on that screen.

Ignore the warning message and continue by clicking Yes. Windows should now start the installation of the driver for the USB stick and display a message that it finished the installation.

Windows is now requesting a reboot of the system to load the updated drivers properly. The USB stick should now be recognized as a hard drive. This makes it possible to create multiple partitions on the USB stick with a software partition program.

Please note that only systems with the updated drivers will recognize the additional partitions. Connected the USB stick to a computer without the modified drivers will only show the first partition of the USB stick.

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The USB Drive Letter Manager runs as a Windows service that solves the problem of drive letter assignments between usb devices, subst folders and network shares by automatically checking if the drive letter has been assigned to the latter before assigning a drive letter to a new USB device.

The software program can reserve letters so that they are not used by local drives, assign letters only from a list of default drive letters and specifically assign drive letters to USB devices by placing an ini file in the device’s root directory.

Another interesting feature of USB Drive Letter Manager is the ability to remove drive letters of card reader slots as long as no card is inserted. If you ever connected a multi-slot card reader to Windows you might have noticed that each slots receives its own drive letter by default which can be a lot depending on the number of different card slots on the reader.

By default USB Drive Letter Manager is only making sure that no network shares or subst folder letters get assigned to a newly connected USB device. Everything else is handled by the USBDLM.INI file. Additional parameters are described on the homepage of the software.

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Individual files can be copied to a device as well but it does not seem possible to copy single files from an USB device. The flash drive can be cleared before restoring files on it but it is not necessary.

The utility provides access to change the properties of the connected USB devices such as the volume label which can be connected to the USB image that has been restored on the USB device.

The software is compatible to Windows XP and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 1.1. Once installed runtime components can be included to provide autorun functionality.

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The capacity of the usb drive is shown on the surface of the usb drive making it very easy to monitor the available storage capacity of the usb drive. I only got an usb drive that is not showing it’s available capacity making it hard to judge if the free space on the device is sufficient to copy all the needed files on it.

The capacity is shown on a ten bar capacity meter which equals the storage capacity percentage of the drive. The available storage is displayed even if the usb drive is not connected to a computer. The usb drives come with a capacity of either one or two gigabytes and look very stylish.

Read More:

Lexarmedia Jumpdrive Mercury

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The USB software has a clean user interface which makes it easy to configure the options in a short period of time. You can select the program that should be autostarted when the USB Drive connects to your computer in the “Start Programs” pane. The backup function can be configured in the “Backup Folders” pane right above “Start Programs”. You may select up to three custom folders that should be backed up everytime the USB drive connects to the computer.

Several default Microsoft Windows folders such as My Documents, My Music and My Pictures have already been added and can be checked. Besides those you can browse your computer and select three folders that should be backed up as well. It should be obvious that you can’t select folders that are bigger than the space of the USB drive.

The total size of a backup is shown in My Pen Drive and you can compare that figure with the size of the USB drive. Great little application, I use it mainly for backing up personal files.

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Applications can be added or removed via the PortableApps menu. The following represents a sampling of apps available on the site:

• 7-Zip Portable
• AbiWord Portable
• Audacity Portable
• ClamWin Portable
• FileZilla Portable
• Firefox Portable
• Gaim Portable
• GIMP Portable
• Miranda IM Portable
• Nvu Portable
• OpenOffice.org Portable
• Sudoku Portable
• Sunbird Portable
• Thunderbird Portable
• VLC Media Player Portable

PortableApps Suite 1.0 is a fantastic way for mobile users to compute securely using software they’ve selected on any Windows PC. So, why don’t I use it? In a word, flexibility.

In order for programs to become portable and thus compatible with the PAS interface, they have to meet certain requirements; I will mention two, here. The first, and perhaps most important, is licensing. Since most commercial software packages prohibit modification, a prerequisite for compression and dependency resolution, the number of potentially portable programs is limited. Secondly, an application must be wrapped as a paf.exe in order to be integrated into the suite. To its credit the PAS site does describe launcher construction, though, this limitation represents a significant obstacle to mass adoption in my opinion.

So, what is a burgeoning tech savant to do? Firstly, don’t forget that programs available sans installers are portable by nature. Often compressed as ZIP or RAR files, the executables contained within are incredibly versatile once decompressed, running off local drives, optical storage media, memory cards (SD, SM, CF), and even venerable floppy disks.

Also, don’t automatically preclude software wrapped in installers. Some — not all — applications can be “unwrapped” in order to expose the files contained within. I recommend Universal Extractor to check whether or not a program is capable of becoming portable. The brain child of Jared Breland, UE extracts files from a myriad of archives, including but not limited to ZIP, ARJ, LZH, MSI, and EXE. Once a package has been unwrapped, you might find yourself looking at folders named {app}, {tmp}, or embedded as well as a few shortcuts and text files depending on your particular software. While this is no guarantee, I’ve had pretty good luck moving all the files in all the directories into a single folder, {apps} for example, and launching the program from there. You can then rename the {apps} folder to something more closely resembling the program contained within, assuming the program proves stable. The last step would be to move your newly created program folder to your preferred platform.

Before you begin testing your entire software library, though, it would be worthwhile to browse the extensive repository of pre-tested portable freeware available at the aptly named The Portable Freeware Collection.

Once you have assembled the requisite applications on your preferred device you will need an interface from which to access them. PStart can be installed on your portable media and launched automatically when connected to a PC. The program is also accessible via a system tray icon. Through PStart’s main menu folders, groups or files can be added and organized. It also sports limited search functions, an attractive notepad, and information about the media. Additional customization options for hardcore tweakers are available as well.

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The author is introducing seven applications: Nmap, Ethereal, Showtraf, TCPDump, Nemesis, John the Ripper and Netpass. Unfortunatly though he is not linking to the tools but only describing them. That means a little googling has to be done on your site to find this applications. Not a big problem though.

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Prices are 99$ for the 4 GB version and 149$ for the 8 GB one, the product will be available in November while the producer already accepts preorders.

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