TC and ext3 question - how?

TC and partition type editing on a flash

I am curious if anyone here can help me figure this out. When using device based volume encryption I find that Windows always wants to format the drive when I insert e.g. a WDE flash drive. I understand that the RAW flash drive appears unformatted and windows wants to format/fix it. I do understand why so that is not my question.

I know there is a simple way to format a flash in ext2/ext3 and then put a device based TC volume on it. I want to learn how to do that so that windows will stop asking me to format my flash/external drives every single time I insert them in the computer. I see lots of people using what appears to be this approach.

Can someone describe how I can format these to work? So far I have used Partition Manager and formatted a flash in ext2 and then another trial in ext3. I insert the flash drive and instantly windows wants to format them. What gives and how can I get this done? Should I just change the partition table somehow?

KISS will ya? LOL!!

 

Partitions? That sounds overly complicated for just a flash drive. The way I see it, you have 2 options:

1) Let Windows format the device (after backing up the data that's on it, of course). Then, instead of doing full disk/partition encryption on the external drive, just put an encrypted container file on it. As long as there's an underlying file system (presumably NTFS) on the disk, you can use up most of the disk space with your encrypted file (e.g., a 7.9GB TC file on an 8GB disk) and Windows will no longer complain about having to format it.

2) Keep the full disk encryption on the drive, but turn off the feature in Windows that is prompting you to format newly-inserted external drives. I believe this can be done by turning off auto play for external devices. You could configure this via the Group Policy editor, or by setting the appropriate DWORD value for "NoDriveTypeAutoRun" in the registry.

 

TC and partition type editing on a flash

Casper, thanks for giving me some suggestions.

Your #1 won't work because I need WDE to use the TC hidden operating system features on these flash drives.

#2 would only be valid on the computer configured for that change. Its at least a partial solution but not complete because its computer specific.

Once I learn to "toggle" the partition type bytes on the flash from the current 06 to 64 then the flash drives will not trigger that notice on any windows machine. I have done my reading and know what I want to accomplish.

I am stuck on Gparted not seeing the flash drives when I mount it on my computer (using live CD version of Gparted). If there are any gparted guru types here feel free to help a guy out. I need to mount Gparted and then set id=64, which would fix my issues. I can't get my flash drives seen yet. I am working towards this goal. I love to learn stuff so this challenge is fun, while frustrating.