Re: USB Drives that think they're CDROMs

["Robert Wesley McGrew" <wesleymcgrew () gmail com>]

On 6/14/06, Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org> wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, some anonymous dude wrote:
> > kick ass.
> >
> > so can this thing be used to boot systems that will boot off USB CDROM
> > drives, but not off thumb drives?
> >
> > can i load a bootable Linux ISO on these suckers and be good to go?
>
> Separate the two:
> 1. Having a USB auto-run/auto-execute code.
> 2. Booting an OS from USB.
>
> For the first, it's a bit ricky but can be done. Just Google it.
>
> For the second, there are several such distributions. Check out:
> DSL = Damn Small Linux

He's talking about a case where the BIOS won't allow normal USB drives
to boot, but will allow USB CDROMs to boot.  DSL, or any other distro,
won't help you in that case.

As far as I can tell, the simulation of a USB CDROM is all hardware in
the case of these U3 smart drives, so my guess is that it would be
possible to boot off the ISO you write to it.  I don't have a computer
here that's picky about what it boots from like this, so I can't test
it.

If someone wants to try it out for themselves, your main hurdle is
going to be what appears to be a size limit for the ISO you write
(6,291,456 bytes).  I haven't tried writing ISOs larger than that to
the drives.  It may work, it may brick your drive, it may just write
the first 6,291,456 bytes, who knows.  There might be a way to reverse
engineer these things further to figure out how to resize how much
drive is allocated for the CDROM.  Interested and talented parties
would probably want to start this line of hacking with taking a look
at the U3 Uninstaller (created by U3) that's floating around.

Or you could come up with an ISO that fits in the 6ish megs and boots,
which could then mount the other drive for the remainder of what you
want.

I'd like to hear from someone experimenting with this.

-- 
Robert Wesley McGrew
http://cse.msstate.edu/~rwm8/
_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave