Using USB thumb drives for promotion

A. Yes.  And that is probably the best way to utilize the USB as a promotional item.  The thumb drive can configured to have two partitions; one as read-only loaded with your designated content, and the other can be read and written as a normal USB drive.

If you order the USB drives from us, we can set this up for you for free as part of our service.  All you need is to provide us the content you need to put on the read-only partition.

If you want to venture and do the configuration by yourself, please continue to read the rest of this FAQ.

Windows 7 and above do not honor more than one partition on any storage devices that is marked as “Removable.”   So even you can create more than one partition from systems such as Linux and Mac, Windows ignores any partitions above the first one.  There are tricks to fool Windows into thinking the drive is a fixed drive by the so-called “flipping the removable media bit” method.  The classical one is by using a legacy tool called BootIt from Lexar.  Google the phrase “Bootit flip removable bit” and you should get a list of links.  Be warned though, a lot of these download links are coming from unsecured sites.  Make sure to update your virus scanning software before the downloading.  With BootIt your chance of getting the removable media bit flip is only about 30%.  If that works for you, voila and hey presto!  What if it doesn’t work? In that case you will need to get the “USB Mass Production Tool” or MPT for short to do the trick. With the MPT you can do a lot of configuration on the USB drive; even report a different capacity then the drive actually has. A lot of dishonest suppliers do use the MPT to cheat.  You can, however, use the MPT to verify the true capacity of the drive and conduct the multiple partitions configuration as described above in our first question.

Many sites suggest the use of tools such as ChipGenius or ChipEasy.  The picture below shows the screenshot from ChipEasy as an example.  These tools can read information from the drive such as the Device ID’s and manufacturer.


In our example above, we can see that the VID is 058F and the PID is 6387.  The VID identifies the manufacturer and the PID identifies one of the products that manufacturer makes.  We also notice that under the Manufacturer field it says “Generic.”  Obviously there is no manufacturer called “Generic.” The reason for that is the data has been tempered by using the Mass Production Tool.  At this point we can just hope that neither the VID nor the PID has been doctored.

If we can trust that piece of information, we can check the real manufacturer from a frequently updated database here.  In our case, 058F maps to Alcor Micro Corp., and PID 6387 maps to Flash Drive.

Now we know the VID, PID, and the manufacturer’s name, the next step is to find the tool itself and this is the tricky part.

For copyright reason we cannot host these MPT’s on our server.  Listed below are few links from different sources.

FlashBoot.ru – A portal leads you to download MPT’s from controllers such as Alcor, iCreate, Netac, QTI, Phison, Prolific, RAMOS, Skymedi, SMI (Silicon Motion), SSS (Solid State System), and USBest. The site is in Russian but you can get it translated if you are using Google’s Chrome browser.

Fix your own USB Flash Drive!!! – You will find MPT for controllers made by Silicon Motion.
FixFakeFlash Inspectortech – A somewhat disorganized blog with various posting on how to detect and fix USB drives.

Find a friend or colleague who can read Chinese or call us at New Cyberian – the only USB supplier who can understand your plight and help you.

Yes, the same procedure making a CD-ROM autorun can be used on an USB drive.  All you need is to put an autorun.inf at the root of the USB drive.  Within the autorun.inf there is a icon entry where you can specify the replacement icon.  For example,

[autorun]
icon=whatever.ico