Life On A Stick: Usb Drives

**Tsen** · 09-19-2006 08:51 PM

So, recently I decided my flash drive was boring, so I decided to spice things up.
Then I decided to add some more to the mix...
And got carried away.
So, here it is: My EVIL MINION.

I started with the obvious: U3 Sandisk Cruzer Micro is such a bland name. So I renamed the drive Evil Minion, not much to it.

Then I changed the icon. Basically, you get a .ico file. Google it and you can find a few pre-made ones, but they're mostly 16x16 resolution, because they're designed for use in Firefox URL bars and tab labels, not for drive icons. So I went and found a free .ico file format plugin for Photoshop and made my own .ico file.
Drawing on the Evil Minion theme, I got a Mini Me picture, shrunk it a bit, and renamed it autorun.ico
I put the autorun.ico file in the root directory of the flash drive, then opened notepad.
I typed:
"[autorun]
icon=autorun.ico"
then saved it as autorun.inf and put that in the root of the flash drive, too. BAM! New icon.

But so far all I'd done was change the asthetics. I wanted to add some serious functionality, too. So here comes another load of fun!
I found a bunch of portable apps. There's tons floating around, and I got the following:
7-Zip (Compression tool)
Abiword (Word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word format)
Firefox (Portable web browser, stores all my goodies like bookmarks, themes, and extensions)
TorPark (Basically another version of Firefox, but this one also automatically connects to a proxy server and encrypts information, so it's more secure and anonymous. It does some other junk, but I won't post about that here)
System Information (Automatically scans the host computer and gives me a lot of diagnostic information, along with some goodies, like MSN Messenger passwords and user names)
Audacity (music editor)
VLC Player (video player)
Sysinternals Process Explorer (Brings up lots of detailed info an all running processes)
LC ISO Creator (For ripping CDs off of my friend's computers to use on mine)
Foxit Reader (Views PDF files, but runs faster than Adobe's PDF viewer and takes much less space)
Great News (An RSS reader)
GIMP Portable (An image editor)

Here's programs that will be on there when I get around to it:
Filezilla (FTP client)
Trillian (All-in-one instant messenger)
µTorrent (Really, really tiny Bittorrent client)
ClamWin (Not sure that's the right name, but it's just an anti-virus.)
DamnSmallLinux (This is really a because I can addition. It's just a tiny version of Linux that can be booted from a flash drive, so I can carry around a separate OS with me. There's also PuppyLinux, which is more or less the same thing. Both come with a ton of applications for Linux built in, so even though they take 50 MB, which is about 10x most of the other apps, there's a lot crammed into that 50 MB. Web browser, word processors, media players, etc. are all bundled with it.)

Anyway, that's all nice and well, but it isn't very intuitive. I mean, I have to open up the USB's directory, browse through the folders, and THEN click on the program. Sure, its only fifteen extra seconds, but I might as well fix that up, too. So here's what I did: First, I downloaded another program, called PStart. Basically, it's like a start menu for my flash drive.
Then, I went and opened up Notepad again, and created a file called launch.bat. It's a simple Microsoft DOS Batch file, crude, but effective. Inside launch.bat, I typed this:
"@echo off
start PStart.exe"
and saved that into the root of the USB drive as well.
The @echo off is just to stop the DOS prompt from repeating every command it gets. Basically, it makes things look nicer, and isn't really necessary. The "start Pstart.exe" is what matters--that's what's going to start the PStart start menu quickly.
Then I went over to autorun.inf, opened it up in notepad and added an extra two lines, so it now reads:
"[autorun]
icon=autorun.ico
open=launch.bat
ACTION = Launch portable workspace"
This adds some info to Window's autorun feature so that PStart will come up immediately. On XP computers, it will pop a window that asks what you want to do, and the top option will be the "PStart" program. So just click that, then press OK. Bam! PStart's running, and from there you can access all the programs on the flash drive in a single click. It also minimizes to the taskbar, so it acts like a second start menu. On older computers, its even faster, since they skip the action select window and just start the program (though I haven't tested this, and it would probably be glitchy since not all my progams are compatible with older Windows versions).

Just as a finishing touch, I went to the properties window and changed autorun.ico, autorun.inf, launch.bat, and some of the program's files to "hidden" status, so the wouldn't appear when browsing the flash drive (unless the user selects "show hidden files" in Windows Explorer).

Anyway, the finished project is this:
When I put in the flash drive, I get PStart to open instantly:

Browsing the flash drive looks like this:

So. If any of the rest of you have super awesome flash drives, or decide to make one, post 'em here. Or ask questions on how to make one, I'm up for that, too.

**ilovefrootloopz** · 09-19-2006 09:00 PM

Hehe nice icon file.

**Tsen** · 09-19-2006 09:05 PM

Okay, I finished adding µTorrent. Guess what? Total size: 170 kB. That's what I call small.

EDIT:
Finished with adding those others, too. Switched Miranda Messenger for Trillian, and haven't got to DamnSmallLinux yet, but other than that its finished.

**Burns** · 09-20-2006 08:13 AM

If you have an extra $20,000 lying around, you could always waste it on this --> http://www.amazon.com/TrekStor-i-Beat-orga...r/dp/B000H1UJRG

**Kaniaz** · 09-20-2006 09:48 AM

What a bastardised Vista theme

**Tsen** · 09-20-2006 10:29 AM

LOL, I know. I played around with WindowBlinds for a bit, and I tried a few of the other skins, but it was really annoying because the pirated versions of WindowsBlinds are glitchy, and the trial version is time-limited, and I hate having to go back and mess with the registry so I can reinstall the trial, so I just found a free theme online. Yeah, it's supposed to be Vista...supposed to.

Oh well, it comes in both black and white task bars, and what I really wanted was a nice, color-neutral theme that would work better with my wallpapers. 'Cuz could you imagine that road background with a blue, silver or olive task bar? I mean, EWW.

**PenguinLord13** · 09-20-2006 02:46 PM

Originally Posted by Burns

If you have an extra $20,000 lying around, you could always waste it on this --> http://www.amazon.com/TrekStor-i-Beat-orga...r/dp/B000H1UJRG
[/b]

Lol that's awesome.

Anyways, that flash drive thing is sick. I love the idea, and the software on it is great. So cool. I would love to make one, but I don't really have time right now. One question though, what size drive did you use?

**Tsen** · 09-20-2006 04:25 PM

Mine's a 1 Gig, but the total size of all those apps combined are only ~110 MB, so you could fit it onto anything over 128 MB, which really, nowadays it's hard to find anthing smaller than 256, and you can get a 1 GB pretty cheap (Mine was $40, but it wasn't anywhere near the best deal possible, I've seen a few 1 Gig USB drives for under $30 recently).
Anyway, I've still got ~850 MB free on my flash drive, which is a plus since that LC ISO Creator program creates ISOs that are about 700 MB, so I can use the spare space to store the ISO image and transfer it. Hence I'd recommend having over a 1 GB USB drive if you were going to do that, or if not, drop the LC ISO program since it isn't as useful without the extra space.

BTW, I saw some bits online about a 16 GB flash drive a while back, but I don't remember the price of it. It did come with U3, though, which is a serious downer.
Basically, U3 is the wannabe version of what I created--the flash drive has a cheesy U3 icon that can't be customized, it has a 100 MB+ partition to store programs in that is remarkably inefficient, and the U3 launch program is only compatible with specialized .u3 programs, which are a pain in the arse to find and load, and usually cost money. It can't auto-run .exe or .bat files, which means that almost all of the portable apps I listed won't work on it. And you're usually spending an extra $10-$20 for the U3 application on the flash drive, which isn't worth it.

**PenguinLord13** · 09-20-2006 06:19 PM

Yeah, flash drives are so damn cheap these days, it's great. I saw 64MB flash drives at staples selling for $2 and wasn't at all surprised, but then I realized that it was the dictionaries at $1.99, and the flash drives were 10 bucks, which is a total rip off, as the 1 gig versions were on sale for like 35 bucks. Oh well, wishfull thinking (though it'll probly happen soon).

**TweaK** · 09-26-2006 12:55 PM

Originally Posted by Tsen

Long post here.
[/b]

Holy crapowitz, that is so awesome. Haha, I had an idea like that a while ago but never carried it out.
You motivated me to make something like this

I'm loving this idea.

**Leixor** · 09-26-2006 11:07 PM

Simple question for you, Tsen. Is the batch file really necessary? Could you not just set the open= to open="Pstart.exe"? (Or does the drive not allow autolaunching of .exe files?) Also, even if the batch file is necessary (Warning, completely stupid nitpick because I'm bored, no offense intended

) You really don't need both lines. Echo off prevents the batch from pasting it's commands to the command line and the @ before echo off is a single line echo off to prevent the "echo off" from being pasted to the command line. But since @ is a one line echo off, and you really only need one line you can just:

@ start Pstart.exe

Yeah I know that was completely pointless, but hey I'm really bored and it'll save you a whopping 9 bytes of space. Which is REALLY pointless because IIRC the default allocation unit size in XP is 4KB (for hard drives anyway, not sure about flash media).
Overall anyway I've always loved the idea of utility flash drives like you've made. I think it would be cool if you'd make the flash drive bootable (newer PCs can boot flash media) to DamnSmallLinux and also retained the autorun functionality in Windows. That way it could be a recovery tool as well. Overall it's pretty sweet. I tried to think of an app you could add but I really didn't come up with anything.

**TweaK** · 09-27-2006 05:07 AM

Maybe replace 7Zip with WinRAR, If possible? It gives a little more functionality and filetype supportage to the whole compressing fileformat application feature on your drive.

**Tsen** · 09-27-2006 12:08 PM

Yeah, the batch file isn't really necessary. Mostly I added it because it made it easier to add other programs to the autostart--I can just add another line of text and have the Miranda IM launch automatically, etc. I guess I could cut it out, but my flash drive is temporarily out of business (Thank you Bill Gates--Windows crashed while I was transferring a file onto it and the flash drive is now no longer accessible).

Anyway, about the Winrar/7zip thing. I think there's a portable version of WinRAR out for U3 drives, but I don't know if anybody's made one for a normal flash drive. Not that there's much of a difference between a portable app and a normal app--just where the files are allocated to.
That's mostly personal preference, though. I like WinRAR, but I'm cheap and lazy, and WinRAR isn't fully free--you only get a demo (albeit a demo with more or less everything unlocked), and when you open the WinRAR console window, you'll get popups telling you to register and all that jazz--which I don't like. 7Zip is completely free, though, and there was a nice portable version of it on a website I saw, so I decided to go with it instead.

**Leixor** · 09-27-2006 05:27 PM

Originally Posted by Tsen

Yeah, the batch file isn't really necessary. Mostly I added it because it made it easier to add other programs to the autostart--I can just add another line of text and have the Miranda IM launch automatically, etc. I guess I could cut it out, but my flash drive is temporarily out of business (Thank you Bill Gates--Windows crashed while I was transferring a file onto it and the flash drive is now no longer accessible).

Anyway, about the Winrar/7zip thing. I think there's a portable version of WinRAR out for U3 drives, but I don't know if anybody's made one for a normal flash drive. Not that there's much of a difference between a portable app and a normal app--just where the files are allocated to.
That's mostly personal preference, though. I like WinRAR, but I'm cheap and lazy, and WinRAR isn't fully free--you only get a demo (albeit a demo with more or less everything unlocked), and when you open the WinRAR console window, you'll get popups telling you to register and all that jazz--which I don't like. 7Zip is completely free, though, and there was a nice portable version of it on a website I saw, so I decided to go with it instead.
[/b]

Ahh yeah the ability to have more than one app auto launch could be useful. I think I'm gonna have to get a flash drive now when I get my student loan check. I've always wanted to do what you've done but now you have motivated me hehe.

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