How to - Create a secret partition on a pen drive

There is no way you can partition USB pen drives. They show up as a removable drive on the PC. In order to do so, you need to trick the operating system into recognizing the USB pen drive as a fixed hard drive. To do this, you will need to create your own set of drivers. In this workshop, we shall demonstrate just that. Doing so, you can create multiple partitions and store your private data on it. Only the first partition will be visible, and the other partitions will not show up on any other PC, but your own.

This way, you can store your personal data away from your friends and family, and also you can avoid viruses affecting this data when plugged in on another computer. To do this, all you need is a simple universal USB pen drive driver, which can be downloaded from ‘http://www.mediafire.com/?oqlgdvcymzz’. Download the archive, uncompress it to a folder on your desktop and get started. Don’t forget to backup the contents of your pen drive, as it will format it.

Step 1: Plug in your pen drive into your PC’s USB port. Next, right-click on ‘My Computer’ and click on ‘Manage’ in the context menu. Click on ‘Device Manager’ on the left pane. This will show all the hardware devices connected to your PC. Now, on the right pane, scroll down to ‘Disk Drives’ and you should see your pen drive connected here. Right-click on the pen drive and select ‘Properties’.

Selecting properties for the flash drive

Step 2: In the properties window that just opened, click on the ‘Details’ tab. From the scroll down menu under ‘Property’, choose ‘Device Instance Path’. You should see a string of characters highlighted in the ‘Value’ window below, which should read something like ‘USBSTORDISK&VEN_&PROD…..’ Right-click on this value and select ‘Copy’. Now close all the windows without saving changes.

Selecting the Device Instance Path

Step 3: Now open the folder that you uncompressed after downloading the universal USB flash drive driver. In this folder, find and open the file named ‘cfadisk.inf’ in ‘Notepad’ or any test editor you prefer (Notepad++ is ideal to be used here’ (download from ‘notepad-plus-plus.org’).

Modifying the flash driver

Step 4: Now locate the words ‘device_instance_id_goes_here’, which is available on line 26. You need to replace these words with the string you just copied to the clipboard from the Device Manager. Save the file and close the editor.