USB Flash Drive is a tiny useful device that is used ubiquitously nowadays because of its small size, make it easy for mobile people to bring along virtually everything (digital) with them. With the space capacity grows exponentially, inversely proportional to its price, it becomes a mundane device for everyone to have. One thing that boggles users is virus or malicious script that can easily bind itself to the device and infect most of its content.
Previously I wrote about Mx One that acts as a standalone antivirus specifically for USB flash drive and USB WriteProtector that could effectively write-protect pen drives.
In this post I will show you how to protect your pen drive by creating fake dummy file. The idea here is to cheat virus so that it "sees" our pen drive is already full, so it will not be able to write itself. In order to do that you first need to check the exact free space on your pen drive. Right click on the pen drive and select "properties".
With the information obtained, you need to type in the following line of code. Change your drive letter and USB flash drive space (in byte) accordingly.
fsutil file createnew F:\DummyFile 7168172032
You are done if you are using windows XP. Your pen drive should be safe from virus. Unfortunately, Windows Vista users need to take additional step because of its tight security. You need to make sure that FSUTIL gets full administrator privilege before you could successfully run the command.
Alternative method
If you don't want to mess up with the command and Vista tight security, you can use some applications that can do the job on the fly.
Dummy File Creator
With dummy file creator you can fill up each and every single byte in your pen drive. It takes a few minute to complete creating the dummy file especially if the size is in the region of gigabytes.
Just google for "dummy file creator" and you will find many similar tools like NOD32 Dummy File Creator.
Technorati Tags: pen drives, virus infection, USB flash drive, flash drive protection
Mar 3, 2009 at 21:34:32
Use the write protect lock on your SD card instead.
Mar 8, 2009 at 04:10:20
thanks for the tip. it really helped.
its cool.
best regards
Jun 27, 2009 at 16:06:18
Nice article. You need to create a folder named autorun.inf to stop loading pen drive viruses automatically. You can visit http://www.srnmicro.com/customers/techfaq.htm for pen drive virus protection methods