Sum Yung Guy

Hows it going?

I bought a fake Sony 8GB thumb drive in a bazaar in kuwait, and I have been trying to find some way or a utility to convert the file system in it to CDFS so that computers think its a cd drive. It should be possible, the U3 flash drives out now fake the computer into thinking part of it is CD-Rom and so do Kingston DTE Privacy flash drives.

Ralck

It may be easier to use a program like Daemon Tools to create virtual CD drives on your computer? The program is free and is quite good so that you can make ISO's of your games and not have to put the CD in every time you want to play.

Sum Yung Guy

Dont need it for games. I need to be able to have the computer recognize the flash disk as a cd/rom when the computer boots up. Been googling this the last 3 nights and have not gotten to far.

Ralck

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1846793,00.asp

Have you tried that article? Booting off of a USB device is also sometimes inabled in the BIOS, so check there also.

Sum Yung Guy

Yea, I was able to add boot sectors to my flash disk yesterday. But its still a flash disk with the FAT filesystem. The only thing I am trying to do now is somehow make the filesystem of my flashdisk CDFS (ISO9660)

Ralck

I understand what you are trying to do, but I'm not sure that is possible. If there are utilities to do this, then I don't know about them. I'm just trying to find alternatives for you.
I will keep looking for any type of utilities to do that, but I'm not sure you can do that, and you may have to look into a USB external CD-ROM.


Searching around a little further, if your in XP Pro SP2 (might work on other variants of XP), you could try this on the command Prompt:
format f: /fs:CDFS
Where the f: is the drive letter of the USB Drive.

If not, http://www.killdisk.com/ might be able to format it as CDFS.
A third option that I'm not sure if it will let you format as CDFS, is to right click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management. Delete all partitions off USB disk, then right click on it and select Format.

Sum Yung Guy

Well the U3 Smart flash drives do it, and so does my Kingston DTE Privacy drive. I wonder if they use a chip inside the flash disk that does it or if they have utilities that do it when its manufactured.

Sum Yung Guy

Using the console says it cannot format CDFS, disk management doesnt give you the option. I also tried a live linux cd and had some more format option in it but no CDFS. Right now I am trying to find out about this program called "mkisofs" can't find a direct link to download it yet, but if you can, can you post it? Unfortantually I am on a government network (in Iraq) and alot of great pages are blocked, and I can get around them with a proxy but downloading through a proxy is another issue :(

Appriecate the help though.

Ralck

I did some research on that program. I'm attaching a tarbal (rezipped it as a .zip) I found of it so you can directly download it from our site (I hope you can do that). Just as a note, it was from a trusted site and to make sure, I scanned it with two different virus programs (Avast and AVG). It looks like you'll have to compile it as it's the source C files, but it has a MS-Dos make script for you.

Also, here is the syntax for it in case you can't access that in your proxy:
mkisofs [-a] [-b boot_image] [-c boot_catalog]
[-A application_id] [-f] [-d] [-D] [-i include-list]
[-l] [-L] [-p preparer] [-P publisher] [-r] [-R]
[-T] [-v] [-V] [-V volid] [-x path] [-z] [-m glob]
-o filename path

I hope this helps and good luck!

Edit: Forgot to copy what the options meant. This is what they are:
OPTIONS

-a
Include all files on the iso9660 filesystem. Normally files that contain the characters '~' or '#' will not be included (these are typically backup files for editors under unix).
-A application_id
Specifies a text string that will be written into the volume header. This should describe the application that will be on the disc. There is space on the disc for 128 characters of information. This parameter can also be set in the file .mkisofsrc with APPI=id. If specified in both places, the command line version is used.
-b boot_image
Specifies the path and filename of the boot image to be used when making an "El Torito" bootable CD. The pathname must be relative to the source path specified to mkisofs. This option is required to make a bootable CD. The boot image must be exactly the size of either a 1.2, 1.44, or a 2.88 meg floppy, and mkisofs will use this size when creating the output iso9660 filesystem. It is assumed that the first 512 byte sector should be read from the boot image (it is essentially emulating a normal floppy drive). This will work, for example, if the boot image is a LILO based boot floppy.
-c boot_catalog
Specifies the path and filename of the boot catalog to be used when making an "El Torito" bootable CD. The pathname must be relative to the source path specified to mkisofs. This option is required to make a bootable CD. This file will be created by mkisofs in the source filesystem, so be sure the specified filename does not conflict with an existing file, as it will be quietly overwritten! Usually a name like "boot.catalog" is chosen.
-d
Omit trailing period from files that do not have a period. This violates the ISO9660 standard, but it happens to work on many systems. Use with caution.
-D
Do not use deep directory relocation, and instead just pack them in the way we see them. This violates the ISO9660 standard, but it works on many systems. Use with caution.
-f
Follow symbolic links when generating the filesystem. When this option is not in use, symbolic links will be entered using Rock Ridge if enabled, otherwise the file will be ignored.
-i include-list
Use the specified file as a list of files to add to the directory tree. This is useful for quickly repacking a CD while adding files to it. The format of this file is path1/file=path2 where path1 is the directory in the ISO9660 file system where file should appear and path2 is the where to find the file. NOTE: This option doesn't work well, and needs to be compltely redone so that integration with the rest of mkisofs is handled in a cleaner fashion.
-l
Allow full 32 character filenames. Normally the ISO9660 filename will be in an 8.3 format which is compatible with MS-DOS, even though the ISO9660 standard allows filenames of up to 32 characters. If you use this option, the disc may be difficult to use on a MS-DOS system, but this comes in handy on some other systems (such as the Amiga). Use with caution.
-L
Allow filenames to begin with a period. Usually, a leading dot is replaced with an underscore in order to maintain MS-DOS compatibility.
-m glob
Exclude glob from being written to CDROM. glob is a shell wild-card-style pattern that must match part of the filename (not the path as with option -x). Technically glob is matched against the d->d_name part of the directory entry. Multiple globs may be excluded (up to 1000). Example:

mkisofs -o rom -m '*.o' -m core -m foobar

would exclude all files ending in ".o", called "core" or "foobar" to be copied to CDROM. Note that if you had a directory called "foobar" it too (and of course all its descendants) would be excluded.
-M path
Specifies path to existing iso9660 image to be merged. The output of mkisofs will be a new session which should get written to the end of the image specified in -M. Typically this requires multi-session capability for the recorder and cdrom drive that you are attempting to write this image to. Support for this is not yet 100% complete, because some handshaking is required between mkisofs and cdwrite in order to determine the next writable address on the cdrom.
-N
Omit version numbers from ISO9660 file names. This may violate the ISO9660 standard, but no one really uses the version numbers anyway. Use with caution.
-o filename
is the name of the file to which the iso9660 filesystem image should be written. This can be a disk file, a tape drive, or it can correspond directly to the device name of the optical disc writer. If not specified, stdout is used. Note that the output can also be a block special device for a regular disk drive, in which case the disk partition can be mounted and examined to ensure that the premastering was done correctly.
-P publisher_id
Specifies a text string that will be written into the volume header. This should describe the publisher of the CDROM, usually with a mailing address and phone number. There is space on the disc for 128 characters of information. This parameter can also be set in the file .mkisofsrc with PUBL=. If specified in both places, the command line version is used.
-p preparer_id
Specifies a text string that will be written into the volume header. This should describe the preparer of the CDROM, usually with a mailing address and phone number. There is space on the disc for 128 characters of information. This parameter can also be set in the file .mkisofsrc with PREP=. If specified in both places, the command line version is used.
-R
Generate SUSP and RR records using the Rock Ridge protocol to further describe the files on the iso9660 filesystem.
-r
This is like the -R option, but file ownership and modes are set to more useful values. The uid and gid are set to zero, because they are usually only useful on the author's system, and not useful to the client. All the file read bits are set true, so that files and directories are globally readable on the client. If any execute bit is set for a file, set all of the execute bits, so that executables are globally executable on the client. If any search bit is set for a directory, set all of the search bits, so that directories are globally searchable on the client. All write bits are cleared, because the CD-Rom will be mounted read-only in any case. If any of the special mode bits are set, clear them, because file locks are not useful on a read-only file system, and set-id bits are not desirable for uid 0 or gid 0.
-T
Generate a file TRANS.TBL in each directory on the CDROM, which can be used on non-Rock Ridge capable systems to help establish the correct file names. There is also information present in the file that indicates the major and minor numbers for block and character devices, and each symlink has the name of the link file given.
-V volid
Specifies the volume ID to be written into the master block. This parameter can also be set in the file .mkisofsrc with VOLI=id. If specified in both places, the command line version is used.
-v
Verbose execution.
-x path
Exclude path from being written to CDROM. path must be the complete pathname that results from concatenating the pathname given as command line argument and the path relative to this directory. Multiple paths may be excluded (up to 1000). Example:

mkisofs -o cd -x /local/dir1 -x /local/dir2 /local

-z
Generate special SUSP records for transparently compressed files. This is only of use and interest for hosts that support transparent decompression. This is an experimental feature, and no hosts yet support this, but there are ALPHA patches for Linux that can make use of this feature.

Attached Files

mkisofs-1.11.zip (130.4 KB, 147 views)

dawgbyte

Try the format command. c:\>format /fs:cdfs, this will change file system that your thumb drive is allowed to use.