It’s finals week at my school and I’ve had several students who’ve had trouble accessing papers or projects on their U3 jump drives. It’s always U3- Store’n’Go and Toshiba and whatever other brands are used have no problems.
I know that you have to click the icon that U3 loads, but when I do that it goes into gobbledeegook or wants me to download something, which I can’t do usually because our computers are blockaded by filtering softwares. Does anybody know why U3s are so different and what to do about it?
When you put in a U3 drive, usually two drives show up in My Computer. One (the one with the U3 icon) will run the program; the other (usually one drive letter higher) should function like a regular USB drive.
So if the U3 drive is E:, you should be able to access their files from F:.
And to answer your question, U3-enabled drives are basically a way for people to carry their favorite programs along with them wherever they go. You can install things like Firefox, with your own profile and bookmarks, and bring it with you on a U3 drive to use, say, at the library. In theory anyway. In practice, I don’t know how many people actually use U3 for that purpose, as opposed to buying the cheapest USB drive they could find which just coincidentally had that fancy-schmancy U3 thing.
I just used the uninstaller last week, it works quickly and quietly and leaves you with a plain old normal flash drive that you can format and do with as you deem fit.
If the large data storage portion of the drive (usually the second to show up in Windows, a FAT32 partition) is going to be used repeatedly on the same machine, one idea is to assign it a unique drive letter.
The real problem with the U3 (and is a problem with many encrypting drive system) and XP/Vista is that the user requires administrative rights on the local machine.
The small executable loads a virtual disk driver to allow access the encrypted filesystem via a new disk drive letter. But this requires the user be a local admin, if the driver has not been installed previously. There is a “Driver installation elevation kit” (or something like that) that does allow non-admin users the right to have temporarily elevated privileges for driver installation, but that still requires administrator installation initially.
This causes no end of grief in corporate desktop deployments, when users expect to be able to use U3 devices that have not been approved and deployed, but do not have administrator rights to run them. This is most likely part of the problem that the OPs students have, too.
