Lexar Secure Jumpdrives

[Brian Kelsay]

Win2k and XP will auto detect the drive, it is 98 that probably needs the auto installer software.  ME may or not work the same as XP, but as others on this list know, I don't give a flip about the kludge that is ME.

The reason Linux found the drive is the filesystem is plain old vfat (fat16).  Not real efficient, but  it works with everything and the drive size is small enough unless you get the 1GB and up drives that any performance loss of fat16 won't matter.  You could repartition and give half over to ext2fs or any other, but if you still want to get to the drive easily under windows, leave part of it as fat16.  Same goes for if you plan to boot to the drive.  You didn't give it's size, so I can't be more precise.  If you plan to encrypt w/ a Linux-based filesystem good luck.  There is a ext2fs driver/program/reader/whatever for NT/2k/XP, but I've not used it. YMMV.  It is likely to be beta.  Actually NT won't even factor in the equation, because only one mfgr of jump drives makes a USB stack for NT.  NT was unable to use USB unless you bought some add-on software.

On the corrupt filesystem, just let MS run checkdisk at boot if it comes up and possibly correct the calculations on the FAT table partition sizes.  QTparted can repartition disks just like Partition Magic, but there is almost always some complaint from Windows on the first boot after repartitioning w/ it.  Let the checkdisk run BEFORE you actually put any important data on it.  Just a friendly warning.  I've been using jump drives and USB mass storage devices for quite a while now.

One further warning, don't waste your time with putting ZipSlack in any form on the jump drive.  Use DamnSmall Linux if you need/want to experiment w/ booting Linux from USB.  Zipslack and those based on it have too many individual files and it takes forever to copy them over.  DamnSmall and the Knoppix derivatives use the compressed filesystem and you are just copying one big file over basically.  Anytime you are copying a large number of files to the jumpdrive, even at USB 2.0 speeds, it takes a long time.  This is possibly a failing of fat16 showing.

Brian Kelsay

>>> "Brian Densmore" <DensmoreB at ctbsonline.com> 12/13/04 10:53AM >>>
Anyone have one of these or something similar? I got one for
my birthday, and immediately plugged it into my laptop and
created a directory and copied some pix of my daughter to it. 
I noticed it had a file structure already on it along with some 
Windows and Mac software. I brought it in to the office to see 
if I could read the directory and sure enough it worked. It did 
complain about a corrupt file system. I also ran the secure disk
software on it to repartition the stick as half secure and half 
not. My question, would it be possible to reformat the stick with 
an encrypted Linux fs and is so how would I be able to access it 
from Windows and Macs? Also, by securing half the card, will I 
still be able to use the whole stick in Linux? Another question, 
the stick has an autorun script for Windows, if I were to wipe the 
Windows software off of the stick would Windows still autodetect the 
stick and mount it? Or is it only autodetecting because of the autorun. 
I have a W2K desktop.