How to use u3-tool in Lucid

As my few blog visitors may be aware, I've been using the U3 customizer for windows for a long time on my 4GB cruzers to make them bootable.

http://blog.sllabs.com/2008/05/booting-heron-from-u3.html


I came across the u3-tool sometime ago when I bought my Clarion MiND, but I've only actually used it recently.

The U3 Customizer tools were released somewhere in 2005 and won't work in anything but windows XP 32bit, and won't recognize U3s over 8GB.



Gonzor discovered TwinMOS's application version supported Larger drives, Vista, and was released in 2007. However, the copy from TwinMOS didn't work for me -- and yet Gonzor's copy from mediafire did, both are version 1.0.5.5

I just bought an open-box 16GB Contour EXtreme with AES from newegg for $40, and it came yesterday.

So I started searching on how to hack a 16GB U3 drive.

"Oh, right, u3-tool... Almost forgot about that!"

In searching for 'how to use u3-tool', I ran across ubuntu launchpad bug report #534070 and played around a little.

I had some issues trying to get the windows version to work, I could resize the CD domain, but 'burning' the ISO failed consistently at 4-5% with a scsi error.

In Ubuntu Lucid, you can just 'sudo apt-get install u3-tool' but:
I was *NOT* able to get /dev/sg* or /dev/sr* to work -- I had to address the disk device itself as /dev/sdf to get it to work.

Hope this helps others out, as I think the major problem people are having is trying to use one of the /dev/sg like the u3-tool help text mentions.

Here's the log of the CD domain resize and burn I ran.

kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdf
Total device size:   14.95 GB (16051601408 bytes)
CD size:             7.69 MB (8060928 bytes)
Data partition size: 14.94 GB (16043474944 bytes)
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -l UbuntuLucid3264.iso /dev/sdf
CD image(1874288640 byte) is to big for current cd partition(8060928 byte), please repartition device.
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -p 1874288640 /dev/sdf

WARNING: Loading a new cd image causes the whole device to be whiped. This INCLUDES
 the data partition.
I repeat: ANY EXCISTING DATA WILL BE LOST!

Are you sure you want to continue? [yn] y
kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -l UbuntuLucid3264.iso /dev/sdf
|**************************************************| 100%

OK

kamilion@SonyRA840G:~$ sudo u3-tool -i /dev/sdf
Total device size:   14.95 GB (16051601408 bytes)
CD size:             1.75 GB (1874329600 bytes)
Data partition size: 13.20 GB (14177271808 bytes)

After I changed the ISO, I also had to open Disk Utility (palimpsest), "Format the Disk"  to create a new MBR geometry, and then create a new NTFS partition.

(Which I've subsequently copied Windows 7's bootmgr to the root of the flash partition and ran "bootsect /nt60 U:", then copied the contents of the 7 install cd to the flash)

Both sections of the device are now bootable, the CD boots ubuntu lucid 32/64 TORAM=Yes, and the flash boots the 7 preinstallation environment.

(Yeah, I know the picture's screwed up -- I'll edit the blogspot CSS later.)

So that all worked just fine for me. Hope it does for you, too!

(And for the person who emailed me to ask about the background... It's from SSDD.)

Burnout Paradise and Windows 7

Long time, no post.


Okay, so I was installing Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box on my shiny new Windows 7 bootable VHD, and MSIInstaller kept throwing error code 2203 at the start of the install.

So, tracked down this gem of info:
Google Groups (microsoft.public.platformsdk.msi)

Windows NT has a nice command line tool called cacls.exe (change ACLs) that can display or set access control rules for files. Kinda like Take Ownership, but without actually having to alter the file's ownership.

And, it turns out a MSIInstaller 2203 error can be caused by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM not having access permissions on the %TEMP% or %SYSTEMROOT%\Installer folder.

Off to the commandline I went.

C:\Users\Kamilion>cacls %SystemRoot%\Installer
C:\Windows\Installer NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)F
Everyone:(OI)(CI)R
BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)F

Well, that looks normal.

C:\Users\Kamilion>cacls %TEMP%
C:\Users\Kamilion\AppData\Local\Temp Raziel\Kamilion:(OI)(IO)F
Raziel\Kamilion:(CI)F

Ahha! I'm the only one with access to my own tempdir...
Well, we'll fix that.

C:\Users\Kamilion>cacls %TEMP% /E /G SYSTEM:F
processed dir: C:\Users\Kamilion\AppData\Local\Temp

So, I've just added an ACL allow for SYSTEM with Full access.
Let's see if it took.

C:\Users\Kamilion>cacls %TEMP%
C:\Users\Kamilion\AppData\Local\Temp Raziel\Kamilion:(OI)(IO)F
Raziel\Kamilion:(CI)F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)F

Sure enough!

Run the installer, and boom, no more 2203 error. I have my Burnout, and learned a new trick!

Sometimes annoying errors can actually be useful.
Edit: Argh, no [code] tags!

Booting The Heron from a U3

Well, one day last week, I got bored and decided to tinker with my Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB with U3. Normally, when you jam one of these in your USB port, it shows up as a 6MB CD-ROM drive and the rest of the space as a USB Mass Storage Device (USB Harddrive).

Now, here's the neat thing: It does this all in hardware.
The chipset inside registers as two distinct devices, a CD-ROM with autoplay software for windows with the fancy U3 launchpad, and the actual flash drive. Windows Device Manager shows two devices, and jamming it in my Ubuntu 8.04 installation also displays as two drives. So, thinking about this, I walked over to a friend's PC, rammed it in the front panel USB, hit the power button, and whacked F12 to show the boot drive selection menu.

Imagine my surprise when even the BIOS recognized it as two distinct devices...
So, I started tooling around google, and discovered the "U3 Universal Customizer".
Normally, people would use this to patch in a new ISO under 6MB to replace the existing one.

I began screwing around with some of the other software from the Hak5 site, and poked around with the USB Switchblade & USB Hacksaw software...

Basically, what they are, is a replacement for the 6MB portion of the drive that contains some 'malware' that will bleed a windows system dry -- swipes all the passwords, sets up an encrypted stunnel, and emails it all off to an address of your choice. Interesting, but not terribly useful unless you're a vengeful 14 year old intent on swiping some other kiddie's myspace passwords for fun and pr0fit. Big deal. Since I run Ubuntu primarily now, it wouldn't affect me, even with WINE installed, due to the very nice "This disc has autoplay, do you want to execute it?" dialog.

So I tinkered around with it some more... And then I found out by trial and error that the U3 Universal Customizer can change the domain size of the CD side of the device! The first time I tried this was with a 10MB ISO containing Process Explorer and some other bits including DiskTrix's Ultimate Defrag. From everything I read, I was told this would brick the unit, but I tried anyway. It worked!

So then I figured, hey, wait a minute. If I can shoehorn 10MB on there, what about 700MB?
Well, first try, it didn't work... but LPUninstaller managed to unbork my drive and LPInstaller got me back to the standard U3 Launchpad.

Then I thought... Hey, what if there's a signature stuck on the ISO somewhere that the U3 bits are looking for?

I dug up a copy of MagicISO, which can normally remaster ISOs, opened up cruzer-autorun.iso, deleted everything but the autorun.inf, dropped process explorer in there, edited the autorun.inf, opened up my Ubuntu 8.04 ISO, saved the bootsector to a BIF file, copied all of the files out of the ISO to C:\Ubu804, loaded the bootsector.bif into the cruzer-autorun.iso, and dropped all the files in C:\Ubu804 in there, and ran U3 Universal Customizer...

*45* minutes later, SUCCESS!

So I jammed the drive into my friend's PC, hit the power button, whacked F12 to get to the boot menu, and selected the U3 Titanium CDROM device...

And bricked my pants as Ubuntu's CD Bootloader came up. Hit enter twice, and about 45 seconds later, I'm staring at the Ubuntu 8.04 desktop, grinning my ass off like an idiot. Plus you can use the rest of the Mass Storage side for "persistant" mode! Now if I could just figure out how to get "toram" working again, and dump openoffice from casper, I'd be one happy camper!

To sum it all up:

Edit the existing cruzer-autorun.iso with MagicISO instead of creating a new ISO.
"Burn" the ISO onto the Cruzer with U3 Universal Customizer.

This should work with just about any bootable ISO that doesn't rely on things expecting hard coded ISO9660 LBA addresses.

(And it should even work on an UBCD4Win / BartPE / OpenSolaris Indiana or Nevada /Nexenta ISO under 4096MB!)

The only thing you need is unrestricted access to a Windows NT5.x (Windows 2000 / Windows XP) machine for about an hour.

Good luck, beware of bricking your $50 keychain bootable CD-ROM!