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?
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.