I have been using a 'genie' flash drive for a while now and find it very useful. however I never did get the password setup to work.

I have just bought a philips flash drive and set it up, and the password protect works very well, the system is installed on the disc itself, so whichever pc it is put into the data is safe. trouble is that the default password is not shown in the instructions, so I have no way to access it to read/write data. I have tried to reformat it put a message comes up saying that it is write protected. and I have written to the supplier and done a google but to no avail.

any ideas.

Vik, no-one has responded, so all I can tell you is what I know from my own ByteStore PenDrive (which seems almost identical to my sister's Phillips one). It has two partitions on it: one emulates a floppy and one emulates a removable HDD. The password software protects the HDD partition and is stored on the FDD part but the password software can also be copied to your hdd/desktop and used from there.

It allows one to reset or remove the password but the documentation shows this to be a new feature so presumably there was a time when the password was either randomly generated or fixed with each device. Mine will also automatically reformat its HDD if the incorrect password is entered 6 times, with a warning to this effect after the 5th attempt.

There is a tiny physical switch on its side which enables/disables the write protection.

Hope that helps or gives you a couple of ideas.

thanks paul

I have actually found the default password after several searches and got into the thing and changed the password. now I find that the activity light isn't working, but thats' another story.

it does seem so far to be a useful accessory in that data is password protected, and there seemed to be (a while ago) many people searching for a similar device. it does mean that you can store things like passwords, credit card details, addresses and much other personal stuff without a great deal of risk.

it is interesting in what you say about how it is arranged and I will be looking into it further to see how secure it really is.

The password protection doesn't really interest me personally but I do find them fantastic for carrying around a few favorite and troubleshooting utilities and for transferring data between pcs.

i agree. a great little tool. on the first one I had the password protection didn't work for some reason. I think it only worked on initial pc set up on or something, which was a waste of time as using it on another pc over-rode the password. but of course extremely useful for carrying around data, swopping between pc's etc.

the password protection could be a very handy extra though.

Paul, Ditto your comments.

But let's look at this in perspective. 512 (or is now 1024 available) megs of data on an *Dcard is amazing! Just think how many could fit inside of a HDD! Oh, you already did? Soorryee... :o :D

The "Harness" is bigger than the "Ant"! :cool: By more than 2K fold! Beats a Tractor Pull... sorta ;)

Just what kind of cameras fit into this data interchangability anyway? Do you need a */1 reader exclusively, or is the USB, serial or whatever hub of the camera that uses removeable disks also capable? How 'bout one without removable media?

Sorry Vic,
Just a short jaunt of a sidetrack.. Doin' double duty usin' a small investment of memory cards 'could' make some sense.

The USB pen drives are neat because there's just one small thing to carry around (along with a mini-CDROM or floppy holding the drivers if you need to install them onto Win98). With WinME and Win2K onwards no special software is needed. Remember to use the Sys Tray Icon to allow you to safely unplug these devices so that you don't lose any data on them. The only thing against such memory is price but they are very robust against physical damage/degradation for a very long time.

Cameras use a variety of different flash memory modules; SmartMedia, CompactFlash, MemoryStick, etc. These can be swapped out of the camera and used just like a pen drive but you will need a relevant USB card-reader to use the modules in this way. You can also obtain 4in1 and 6in1 card-readers to allow you to use more than one sort of media.

If the camera doesnt have removable flash memory then you can only interface the camera directly with the PC.

A 4in1 reader, for example, will display four removable drives in MyComputer but each will be "an inaccessible drive" (like an empty floppy or CD drive) unless card modules were inserted into the reader's memory module slots.

How Flash Memory Works (http://computer.howstuffworks.com/flash-memory.htm)

The quantities of memory they carry keeps on rising eg 2GB Pen Drive (http://geek.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=859665/) if you can afford it. I would dive in if I knew for sure I could make my PC boot from one of them.

My guess is they will replace CDRW as well as Floppies as time goes by and the smaller devices (64-256MB) are within most peoples budgets.

I would dive in if I knew for sure I could make my PC boot from one of them.

That can be annoying to figure out. I eventually got mine to boot from my 128 meg drive by configuring it as a bootable zip drive.

Pave. I tried that and all the other usb bootable devices in the bios setup; tried fdisking and reformatting etc etc. Somehow or other each BIOS is different (perhaps I just need to upgrade) and they havent quite sorted out the compatibility routines. Trying to boot from usb-hdd comes closest but I get an incompatible file system or something like that and yet the structure looks normal enough from a hex editor. Guess I'll get there in the end but no big splash on 2gig till I get the 128meg to "do the trick".

I would love to achieve it just to have an emergency boot pen drive. That would be OK for my own setup but would be unlikely to work on many other "problem" PCs until the technology has been around for a while.

Has anyone tried this [URL="ironkey.com/"]hardware encrypted flash drive /URL] from Ironkey.com? It looks awesome.

Has anyone tried this [URL="ironkey.com/" hardware encrypted flash drive /URL] from Ironkey.com? It looks awesome.

You wouldn't happen to have a financial stake in that company by any chance?? People who join the forum to endorse particular products are considered suspect... Please clarify your relationship with this company...

This is a 3 years old thread by the way... That makes your sudden interest in it even more suspicious...