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OT: One for the USB experts...

Sorry, this is waaaaaaaaaaay off-topic, but I wondered if any of the USB experts might happen to know:

I was at the UK Embedded Systems Show the other day, and got a free USB stick from Farnell.
When plugged-in, this shows up as two drives:
1. A CD-ROM drive, which has an auto-play promotional movie on it;
2. A "normal" USB drive.

The trouble is, every time you plug it in, it tries to play the movie again!

:-(

Win-XP says the CD-ROM part is read-only, so won't let me delete the files or format it.

So, is there any way to get rid of this movie?
Or do I just junk the whole stick?

Parents
  • As long as I know, there is no way to make a "CD-ROM" partition on the MBR of a HDD or a USB stick.
    For USB stick, multiple LUNs support such a configuration easily.
    A LUN for usual USB stick returns PDT=0x00 to INQUIRY, CD-ROM LUN returns PDT=0x05 (PDT: Peripheral Device Type)

    I heard OTi, a major manufacturer of controller chips for USB stick, has released such chips.
    U3 also applies OTi chip.

    I believe the CD-ROM files are stored on the FLASH, too.
    I suppose a hidden command tunes the size of CD-ROM "partition" on the FLASH.
    But I don't know the command.

    Then, you'd better to find an expert cracker :-)

    Tsuneo

Reply
  • As long as I know, there is no way to make a "CD-ROM" partition on the MBR of a HDD or a USB stick.
    For USB stick, multiple LUNs support such a configuration easily.
    A LUN for usual USB stick returns PDT=0x00 to INQUIRY, CD-ROM LUN returns PDT=0x05 (PDT: Peripheral Device Type)

    I heard OTi, a major manufacturer of controller chips for USB stick, has released such chips.
    U3 also applies OTi chip.

    I believe the CD-ROM files are stored on the FLASH, too.
    I suppose a hidden command tunes the size of CD-ROM "partition" on the FLASH.
    But I don't know the command.

    Then, you'd better to find an expert cracker :-)

    Tsuneo

Children
  • There are a number of companies that are selling this kind of products.

    One products boots a special application from the CD partition, and this program then makes cryptographic access to the data on the second partition, while allowing no-install applications to be run on windows and accessing protected data files.

    Another common trick is that a number of GSM modules initially boots as a CD, to allow the PC to install the drivers from the virtual CD. Obviously a bit problematic when not using them on a Wintel platform.

    There are also a number of USB thumb drives with one open partition with either a rescue program or a cryptographic driver, and a second disk that has protected or unprotected user data.