OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive... Read only?

NTDEV
1

OK, OK… I admit it. I must be brain damaged.

I’m sitting here, holding the very attractive little 1GB USB Flash Drive that came in the mail (hidden) with content from the DDC. I want to erase the DDC content (cuz, uh, well… YOU know) and use the darn flash drive.

But, ah… (I’m almost afraid to say this)… I keep getting a message that the drive is READ ONLY.

And I can’t find any switch, anywhere, to make it Read/Write.

I’ve already destroyed ONE such drive trying to find the switch.

Can somebody save me from myself, and tell me how to turn off the read only protection??

Peter
OSR

2

No can do. I went through this process myself a few weeks ago, and I
couldn’t find a way to do it either. Alas.

So, given that it appears to be readonly (maybe there’s some super
secret thing), and that this had to cost, I don’t know, an order of
magnitude more than a DVD, anyone have any thoughts as to why they went
this route?

mm

xxxxx@osr.com wrote:

OK, OK… I admit it. I must be brain damaged.

I’m sitting here, holding the very attractive little 1GB USB Flash Drive that came in the mail (hidden) with content from the DDC. I want to erase the DDC content (cuz, uh, well… YOU know) and use the darn flash drive.

But, ah… (I’m almost afraid to say this)… I keep getting a message that the drive is READ ONLY.

And I can’t find any switch, anywhere, to make it Read/Write.

I’ve already destroyed ONE such drive trying to find the switch.

Can somebody save me from myself, and tell me how to turn off the read only protection??

Peter
OSR

3

Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course, SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the board.

It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when it’s in the provided case. And, while the board does have several unpopulated pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything similar.

So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem, "unusual:…

Peter
OSR

4

Peter, if you’re really desperate, read?the part# printed on chip with a magnifier, try to?find the datasheet. Then get a soldering iron with fine tip at Radio Shack or Frys. You might be able to make it?R+W. Happy hacking.-:slight_smile:

–
Calvin Guan?
Broadcom Corp.
Connecting Everything(r)

----- Original Message ----
From: “xxxxx@osr.com”
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 11:28:45 AM
Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?

Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course, SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the board.?

It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when it’s in the provided case.? And, while the board does have several unpopulated pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything similar.

So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive.? How, ahem, "unusual:…

Peter
OSR

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

5

That is because those PPTs are soooooo important, we can’t be trusted to run
the risk of deleting them.

No cost is too small to be not optimized away, no matter how useless that
leaves the resulting widget.

-dave

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@osr.com
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 2:29 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?

Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course,
SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the board.

It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when it’s
in the provided case. And, while the board does have several unpopulated
pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything
similar.

So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem,
"unusual:…

Peter
OSR

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

6

Did you try using WinHex to open the physical drive and try writing? I saw
the drive is formatted as a giant floppy with no MBR/partition table, but
just begins with a partition boot record.

wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
>
> Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course,
> SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the
> board.
>
> It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when
> it’s in the provided case. And, while the board does have several
> unpopulated pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or
> anything similar.
>
> So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem,
> "unusual:…
>
> Peter
> OSR
>
>
>

7

Well if that is the case, one would have hoped for more PPT’s. While I
know there were some slides that we were warned would not be there, there
were also presentations missing (some of which I did not make it to, and
hoped for some clue from the PPT’s).

–
Don Burn (MVP, Windows DDK)
Windows Filesystem and Driver Consulting
Website: http://www.windrvr.com
Blog: http://msmvps.com/blogs/WinDrvr

“David R. Cattley” wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> That is because those PPTs are soooooo important, we can’t be trusted to
> run
> the risk of deleting them.
>
> No cost is too small to be not optimized away, no matter how useless that
> leaves the resulting widget.
>
> -dave
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@osr.com
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 2:29 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?
>
>
> Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course,
> SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the
> board.
>
>
> It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when
> it’s
> in the provided case. And, while the board does have several unpopulated
> pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything
> similar.
>
> So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem,
> "unusual:…
>
> Peter
> OSR
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>

8

Indeed they are.

I’m totally making all of this up, but my general theory for the day is
that this was supposed to have something to do with whatever they are
calling ‘active content’ today? Is that SilverLight? I don’t know, but
I figure since it’s a little slow to load off a thumb drive, running off
a DVD would have probably been a little sluggish.

Also, I figure that this has something to do with autorun being handled
differently on DVD v. THUMBDRIVE. How so? I have no idea, but I can
totally see someone like the person who planned the registration process
thinking that getting this to run more quickly, better, automagically,
whatever was THE MOST important thing, and would spend accordingly.

So, I took a look at the autorun.in on the DDC and the WDK 700.1 DVD:

Like abive, I don’t know what these mean either, but here they are:

DDC THUMB DRIVE:

[Autorun]
shellexecute=Default.HTML
action=Webpage
UseAutoPlay=1
label=USB Drive

WDK 7000.1 DVD:

[autorun]
ShellExecute=KitSetup.exe
ICON=KitSetup.exe,0

So, I feel confident that these are different, but that’s about it for me.

One thought I had is that as AutoRun is not exactly secure, as well as
incredibly annoying, a lot of people turn it off, but I think/wonder if
they’ve done a SFP special here as, continually adding/changing ways to
get useless splashscreens et. c. to run, if you happen to know the right
registry settings, file settings, et. c. As I recall, disabling autorun
from a cd on Windows 95 was a simple registry value edit, yet, to this
day, all sorts of super helpful, internet aware, cloud enabled menus pop
up no matter what the hell I disable (though the irony here is that I
think that this is largely my IT’s doing via Group Policy), and when I
look in the registry, it doesn’t appear to be a simple 1 or 0 thing
anymore. This also seems to be much more common, for me at least, with
thumb drives. If it can find anything that it considers a ‘picture,’ my
computer wants to let me know about, at least on XP SP2, and as it
happens, anything with, say, ‘default.html’ will almost certainly have
jpeg somewhere.

Of course another possibility is that someone thought it would be
amusing to watch us post while reverse engineer it/make shit up.

My two cents,

mm

David R. Cattley wrote:

That is because those PPTs are soooooo important, we can’t be trusted to run
the risk of deleting them.

No cost is too small to be not optimized away, no matter how useless that
leaves the resulting widget.

-dave

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@osr.com
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 2:29 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?

Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course,
SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the board.

It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see when it’s
in the provided case. And, while the board does have several unpopulated
pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything
similar.

So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem,
"unusual:…

Peter
OSR

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

9

In my personal opinion, the thumb drive, though a great thing, is easily
the biggest real security threat that there is. There’s just no second
place, as I see it, at the moment, especially in the presence of what
most IT types, security consultants and PM’s call ‘their number one
priority’ - security. Usually, what I’ve seen - this is pretty much the
FED paradigm - is that they won’t let anyone attach laptops until they
run some AV with a not especially good success rate that frequently
hasn’t been update either for hours, and you have to do it every time
you reconnect, so contractors just say ‘no thanks,’ and in short order,
the resulting inconvenience results in everything getting passed around
on thumbdrives (which most places do not scan, because they are
‘banned’), which causes problems in and of itself, but the killer is
that there’s always someone who forgets their thumbdrive, so they get
shared, and then no one wants to delete what’s no theirs, especially
since then you couldn’t read it. The other reason why this are I think
much more problematic than the hot button security buzzword pandemic
these days - pda’s/mobile/et. c. - is that in certain types of
hardened/isolated environments, where security really is the priority,
using an rf device would a B-A-D idea, and thumb drives do not pose that
risk for the would be exfiltrator, which is the real concern, I think.

mm

Martin O’Brien wrote:

Indeed they are.

I’m totally making all of this up, but my general theory for the day is
that this was supposed to have something to do with whatever they are
calling ‘active content’ today? Is that SilverLight? I don’t know, but
I figure since it’s a little slow to load off a thumb drive, running off
a DVD would have probably been a little sluggish.

Also, I figure that this has something to do with autorun being handled
differently on DVD v. THUMBDRIVE. How so? I have no idea, but I can
totally see someone like the person who planned the registration process
thinking that getting this to run more quickly, better, automagically,
whatever was THE MOST important thing, and would spend accordingly.

So, I took a look at the autorun.in on the DDC and the WDK 700.1 DVD:

Like abive, I don’t know what these mean either, but here they are:

DDC THUMB DRIVE:

[Autorun]
shellexecute=Default.HTML
action=Webpage
UseAutoPlay=1
label=USB Drive

WDK 7000.1 DVD:

[autorun]
ShellExecute=KitSetup.exe
ICON=KitSetup.exe,0

So, I feel confident that these are different, but that’s about it for me.

One thought I had is that as AutoRun is not exactly secure, as well as
incredibly annoying, a lot of people turn it off, but I think/wonder if
they’ve done a SFP special here as, continually adding/changing ways to
get useless splashscreens et. c. to run, if you happen to know the right
registry settings, file settings, et. c. As I recall, disabling autorun
from a cd on Windows 95 was a simple registry value edit, yet, to this
day, all sorts of super helpful, internet aware, cloud enabled menus pop
up no matter what the hell I disable (though the irony here is that I
think that this is largely my IT’s doing via Group Policy), and when I
look in the registry, it doesn’t appear to be a simple 1 or 0 thing
anymore. This also seems to be much more common, for me at least, with
thumb drives. If it can find anything that it considers a ‘picture,’ my
computer wants to let me know about, at least on XP SP2, and as it
happens, anything with, say, ‘default.html’ will almost certainly have
jpeg somewhere.

Of course another possibility is that someone thought it would be
amusing to watch us post while reverse engineer it/make shit up.

My two cents,

mm

David R. Cattley wrote:
> That is because those PPTs are soooooo important, we can’t be trusted
> to run
> the risk of deleting them.
>
> No cost is too small to be not optimized away, no matter how useless that
> leaves the resulting widget.
>
> -dave
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
> [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@osr.com
> Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 2:29 PM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?
>
>
> Prompted by Martin’s reply, I’ve taken a drive apart (not my, of course,
> SNoone’s)… and I can confirm that there’s no switch anywhere on the
> board.
>
>
> It does, however, have an attractive little LED that you can’t see
> when it’s
> in the provided case. And, while the board does have several unpopulated
> pads, no spot on the board is conspicuously labeled “R/W” or anything
> similar.
>
> So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive. How, ahem,
> "unusual:…
>
> Peter
> OSR
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
>

10

Regarding ThumbDrive vs. CDROM:

I am very glad it is a ThumbDrive and not rotating media. When I attend
these conferences, I carry a laptop without an optical drive. The USB drive
is a *good idea* in my opinion. Having it read-only might be an annoyance
but I for one am happier with that (and no worse off than a CDROM).

As for all the rest, I was just poking some fun at the read-only nature.
Sure, we might have expected it to be R/W but in the grand scheme, that is
minor. I have a nice 16G Sandisk already…

-dave

11

I investigated this craptacular. The manufacturer of the device has a
utility for moding its state, but naturally it is not available for
download.

Mark Roddy

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:25 PM, wrote:

> OK, OK… I admit it. I must be brain damaged.
>
> I’m sitting here, holding the very attractive little 1GB USB Flash Drive
> that came in the mail (hidden) with content from the DDC. I want to erase
> the DDC content (cuz, uh, well… YOU know) and use the darn flash drive.
>
> But, ah… (I’m almost afraid to say this)… I keep getting a message that
> the drive is READ ONLY.
>
> And I can’t find any switch, anywhere, to make it Read/Write.
>
> I’ve already destroyed ONE such drive trying to find the switch.
>
> Can somebody save me from myself, and tell me how to turn off the read only
> protection??
>
> Peter
> OSR
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

12

I’m impressed that you could determine the device’s manufacturer. I sure didn’t get that far!

Peter
OSR

13

> So, ah… I think they gave us a read-only USB drive.

I hope the next USB drive on the next DDC will be write-only :slight_smile:

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

14

>I investigated this craptacular. The manufacturer of the device has a utility for moding its state, but

naturally it is not available for download.

Here is it. The site is in Russian, but note the Windows button of “Ckachat’” (Cyrillic has a single special letter for “ch” as also for trailing palatizing sign), I think it should work. People claim that this tool saved some information for them.

http://www.flashboot.ru/index.php?name=Files&op=view_file&lid=69&pagenum=2

BTW: can Microsoft attach Live Search for the Device Manager property page with hw IDs? :slight_smile:

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Windows DDK MVP
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

15

Gee… I’m not sure why, but, you know… I seem to feel just SLIGHTLY hesitant to download content from a Russian web site that I know nothing about, and with the web site in Cyrillic. Unless that site is AllOfMp3 that is… but that goes without saying.

Peter
OSR

16

xxxxx@osr.com wrote:

Gee… I’m not sure why, but, you know… I seem to feel just SLIGHTLY hesitant to download content from a Russian web site that I know nothing about, and with the web site in Cyrillic. Unless that site is AllOfMp3 that is… but that goes without saying.

Although I hesitate to burst the wild engineering frenzy we’re seeing
here, I would point out that an empty, unlocked, retail, fully
warrantied 1GB USB flash drive costs approximately $6 today. That’s the
cost of roughly 3 minutes of time for a driver developer.

In my view, this thing is roughly equivalent to receiving a rewritable
DVD that happens to have been finalized. I think it is time to move on…

–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

17

> I’m impressed that you could determine the device’s

manufacturer. I sure didn’t get that far!

It probably has an FCC approval id on it, which you can look up in a
database.

Jan

18

It probably has a vendorid string which you can google.
Mark Roddy

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Jan Bottorff wrote:

> > I’m impressed that you could determine the device’s
> > manufacturer. I sure didn’t get that far!
>
> It probably has an FCC approval id on it, which you can look up in a
> database.
>
> Jan
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

19

?? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??? ???

My apologies to anyone who really knows russian, ??? probably isn’t the right
form of “free” :slight_smile:

From: “xxxxx@osr.com”
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:26:15 PM
Subject: RE:[ntdev] OT: The DDC USB Flash Drive… Read only?



Gee… I’m not sure why, but, you know… I seem to feel just SLIGHTLY hesitant to download content from a Russian web site that I know nothing about, and with the web site in Cyrillic. Unless that site is AllOfMp3 that is… but that goes without saying.

Peter
OSR

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

20

Tim Roberts wrote:

Although I hesitate to burst the wild engineering frenzy we’re seeing
here, I would point out that an empty, unlocked, retail, fully
warrantied 1GB USB flash drive costs approximately $6 today. That’s the
cost of roughly 3 minutes of time for a driver developer.

In my view, this thing is roughly equivalent to receiving a rewritable
DVD that happens to have been finalized. I think it is time to move on…

Right - but this site explains why and how your drives
were made read-only.
It discloses some IMHO pretty amazing things that you can do
with these cheap USB drives!
For example, it has detailed instructions how to configure
USB drive from a major mfg as one or two partitions,
read-only (USB CD) and read-write (disk),
how to put a bootable ISO image on the CD part, modify the serial
number, hardware ID, etc.

Doubts to download unknown software are well justified. From their
forums - at least some boot images, linked from that site,
(other than the flash format utlity) may contain troians.

Maxim, thanks for the link!
[and good that it’s in Russian … I still can’t read Chinese :-(]
– pa