USB Immunizer On Live USB's

does anyone know if immunizing a USB will affect how it runs when using it as a live USB?

 

By live you mean "bootable usb"? What do you need a bootable USB drive for? Try it. If it doesn't work then you didn't lose anything. You can always make a bootable DVD.

 

yes

lots of things like an installer for windows 7, antimalware boot disks, full disk imaging disks etc

i would lose something if it did not work, the live usb with more than 15 different boot disks on it.

 

You wont loose anything if you simply copy the content to your desktop first. Think smarter not harder. Disk images should be stored on an external HDD and not a portable USB drive. I make bootable cd's. It should not effect it. It wont delete anything. If the stick is no longer bootable then boot back into Windows. Copy the contents of the stick onto your desktop. Format the stick then copy then content back over. Its that easy.

FYI..................BD blocks your Toolkit link.

 

Interesting question. USB immunizer software usually disables the auto.inf so the stick can't run an executable automatically when it's plugged in. I would think that this has nothing to do with the files that make a USB stick bootable. I haven't tested this though.

 

i have tried copying the contents of a bootable USB to another disk and copying it back again, it did not work as the bootloader and some other items dont copy across for some reason and that was without even a USB immunization..

thanks for the heads up

indeed it is, cant believe i cant find an answer for it on the internet.

lets hope so as i dont think i will find a definite answer on this forum without me testing it.

 

You might be able to image the bootable USB drive, but again I haven't tried it.

Yes, it seems like your the man to figure out the USB immunization question.

 

after some tests, i have reached a conclusion.

it seems that you can not immunize a bootable USB which has any sort of Windows/PE based distro on it as they use a custom autorun.inf file which the immunizer would wipe out.

linux distributions dont seem to have an autorun.inf file located in the root directory so they are immune from the immunizers autorun.inf which does reside in the root. however that may vary by every linux distro or vary by the program that creates the bootable USB.

so the safest answer is- no you can not immunize a bootable USB without it affecting the bootability of the USB

 

Thanks for checking this out. It's important because many USB immunizing apps do so automatically upon inserting the device, and once it's done I don't know if it can be reversed.

 

your welcome

dont think you can reverse it without formatting the USB especially if the USB was using the NTFS file system and even if you could reverse it you would need to know the exact autorun.inf file contents prior to the immunize along with the exact copy of the bootmgr.efi and bootmgr files.

so you raise a very good point about immunizing apps which auto immunize USB's, need to be careful if you use bootable USB's