friends,
help needed in embedding an software into usb thumpdrive and that can't be formatted! Basically my idea is to protect my usb thumpdrive. I want to build an application and to embed it into the usb flashdrive memory.. the application should not get erased while formatting. The idea is something like U3smart. The program should get written into the chip. and when we plug the flashdrive into a computer, it should ask for the password to access the pendrive. if password is entered correctly then it should grant access for the user, if password is wrong the usb thump drive should not open in any cause. the app should not get erased, but the whole driver can be formatted but the file should still remain in its chip memory..
Im not an expert in microcontroller. now guy pls tell me the whole scopes in developing such an setup..
tell me what all hardware i would require, the apps and development kit to develop such a setup...

cheers
Ganesh

 

You could use some thubbrivev memory chip as the main memory, and then you need a microcontroller that would be able to act as a mass storage device over usb, provide the access to the disk and manage some write permissons. Custom usb drivers will probably be needed to enter the password.

 

You could use some thubbrivev memory chip as the main memory, and then you need a microcontroller that would be able to act as a mass storage device over usb, provide the access to the disk and manage some write permissons. Custom usb drivers will probably be needed to enter the password.

And that's the easy part. You would still need to write the driver on the PC side.

 

It is quite easy to make a cd partition on flash drive. Just google the phrase "cd partition on flash drive" This way you will not not be able to format that partition. However the password protecting bit is quite hard to do. It is not a problem to encrypt but then extra software is required. You can perhaps put a self extracting zip/rar archive on the disk. And then password protect it