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I'm confused.

I removed a U3 garbage from a USB stick and then formatted it to NTFS. All that worked like a charm as far as I could tell.

However, now I cannot copy, cut or paste any files to it. What's the problem?

EDIT: Does it only work on the machine it was formatted on? As I formatted it on XP Pro, took it out, plugged it into Vista to copy stuff to it but access was always denied, no matter what I copied. I thought a run as admin was needed but couldn't find an option for it by right clicking the drive that usb stick was allocated.

EDIT 2: I think I'm starting to get it, that's how the security of the NTFS format of a USB stick works, nothing rogue can copy and I presume execute from it that way.

Feel free to help me out with a better explanation.

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Greetings MDV. Those U3 drives are tricky little devils. There's actually a special procedure to getting rid of the U3 partition. That could be why it's messed up now. To fix it, I'd try reinstalling U3 and then remove it properly. By default, Windows installations do not allow normal USB devices to auto-execute, so there's really no need to fear if your flash drive gets infected, as long as you right click it in explorer and select open so that you know you're browsing the files on the drive and not running anything. You can also create your own custom autorun.inf file in the root of the USB drive and make it read only to help prevent it being overwritten by flash drive infecting malware.

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Believe it or not I managed to get it working. I used the u3 uninstall tool to remove the u3 rubbish and then formatted it to NTFS.

Thankfully I have a copy of Total Commander, it seems I need admin rights to be able to copy to the USB stick now - at least on my Vista Home Basic machine. Total Commander allows me to do copying run as administrator.

On the XP Pro machine that I formatted it on, so far it appears I do not need anything. I'm thinking that is probably because I was logged in as an administrator though. I set it up with an admin and limited account. I normal use just the limited account.

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Thank you. I thought it was odd too.

I changed it to NTFS for security purposes and have since presumed that NTFS requires admin privileges to copy to it.

At first I thought it was TeraCopy failing me with large file size of progs I wanted to copy but then a simple notepad.txt wouldn't work I knew something was up.

Then with the advantage of TotalCommander which provides me with a check box that says

"Copy NTFS permissions (may need administrator rights)"

which of course I tick and allow it all to proceed and it works fine.

I will check to see how it functions on my limited account on XP Pro and see if I need to go through the same steps.

In the meantime I will continue presume that NTFS requires admin privileges to copy or paste to it.

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Hee hee, if you really want to make it invulnerable to attack you can put U3 back on then use a special tool someone developed for replacing the U3 partition with your own custom ISO (can't really talk much about it here as it's kinda hack-ish) then put the files you want on your custom ISO, and since Windows will see it as a CD-rom device, it will be totally read-only and therefore off limits to anything that tries to write to it. I did it with mine and replaced U3 with a custom image of Bart's PE.

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Cool, any idea how it works? I know with floppies it worked the same way as VHS tapes, a tab that would normally push through the little hole lets it write to the disk, but if locked, it couldn't push through so it wouldn't write to it. With USB it seems it would have to be some strange sort of software means.

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According to what I just read about new egg, unless I'm in Canada or China, there's not much point. The other two main New Egg sites.

Mind you I am awaiting some email responses about them from within this country.

Yeah Australia, that big land mass that prevents New Zealand from being invaded :(

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