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Showing off my stick

So I was going to make this innuendo-laden post about what I do with my stick, but decided against it. This is a family blog after all. Anyway, USB sticks are cheap these days, so I always carry a couple of them with me. The latest acquisition is a 4GB Cruzer which I bought the other day for around €20.

Of course, the first thing you need to do when you buy a Cruzer is to remove the god-awful U3 software that comes with it. Fortunately they do provide a removal tool (it’s on a hidden partition on the drive or something). But once that’s done it’s a very useful drive in a very practical form factor. Now, here’s what I did with my 2 drives.

Portable Apps

The first one is a general purpose storage disk, FAT formatted, containing a collection of drivers and tools that I use a lot at work and when fixing computers for friends and family. Putting installers for useful tools on the USB drive is nothing new of course, and to be honest, not really all that useful. That’s where PortableApps comes in.

PortableApps is a framework and toolset that installs itself on a flash drive, and gives you a portable “Start Menu” type thing that launches and sits in your systray when you insert the USB stick (provided you have Autorun enabled). But that’s not all, there are quite a few useful applications and tools that will install in the PortableApps framework, and run straight off your USB stick without installing it on the computer, saving all settings back to the USB stick.

You can download portable versions of popular freeware and opensource applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, The Gimp, OpenOffice.org, Putty, Winscp, Notepad++ and so on. They all launch and run straight off the USB stick, so for the larger apps you will want a stick with fast read access.

The Rescue Stick

When everything goes south, and you’re left with a smoking pile of debris that will not boot, any number of useful tools and drivers won’t save you. What you need is a rescue cd to boot from. Now a CD is not very practical to carry around with you (unless you’re into really big and flashy bling or something), so why not make a rescue stick?

Using the System Rescue CD, you can do just that. Copying the contents of the CD to your USB drive and running the Syslinux utility will create a bootable USB stick with everything you need to salvage that wrecked PC. Contents include memtest86 and aida for hardware diagnostics, ntfs-3g and ntfstools for salvaging a borked NTFS file system, ntpass to recover lost passwords, partition utilities and boot managers to fiddle with the partition layout and boot unbootable partitions and restore deleted ones, and a stripped down Gentoo Linux system with lots and lots of tools to salvage what’s left.

Those are just some of the many tools provided on this CD. It’s an indispensable tool for any system admin or support tech, provided you primarily work with newish hardware that supports booting from USB devices.