What’s on my USB key?

I’ve gathered many programs for my USB memory stick so I thought I would list them here. Actually, when you get down to it, I have a couple of memory sticks I keep with me most of the time. The first one is an older stick and is only 256 mb. However, it has a switch that you can flip to make it read-only. I use this stick to run the Windows utilities from Helix. The read-only switch comes in handy because some antivirus programs identify a few of the Helix tools as malware.

My second, and primary, memory stick is a SanDisk 8gb U3 Cruzer. The first thing I did was to remove the U3 partition with the included software. I then had to use my Mac to recreate the primary partition because, for some reason, when I tried to make the USB stick bootable, it would hang when grub was loading. Once I recreated the partition, grub worked fine. So, onto the list:

My first, and favorite install is the USB bootable version of Backtrack3 beta. Here are the instructions on how to do this.

PCRepairSystem – this folder takes just over 26 mb of space, contains around 37 useful tools and was built to fit on a 32 mb drive.

Helix Tools – To get the tools from the Helix distribution, I mounted the Helix iso and copied the Autoplay, IR, and Language folders, and helix.exe, helix.ico, indext.html, and autorun.inf into a folder.

PortableApps – Portable Apps lets you pick and choose various applications that have been specially crafted to run solely from a portable USB drive. Here is my list of installed apps: 7zip, ClamWin, CommandPrompt, Eraser, Firefox, Gaim, Keepass, Notepad++, OpenOffice, Backup, Putty, Sumatra, Sunbird, Thunderbird, VLC, and WinMD5Sum.

PortableServers – This is a very impressive service. When you visit the link, you can choose various self-contained web applications (ie. Apache, php, etc.) and then select applications to run on a portable web server. For example, on the server side, I am running Apache2, MySQL5, and PHP5. The applications I have installed are: Drupal, Joomla, Knowledgeroot, Mediawiki, OpenDB, WordPress, and xoops. A very nice way to help you customize some of these programs without having to setup a complete web server.

Various Tools Folder – My own collection of various tools I have picked up over the years. I have the complete collection of Sysinternals tools, the Firecat listing (a listing of Firefox security extensions), the ISC Alert applet, NetStumbler, and TrueCrypt5.

I realize that there are some duplicates in this listing, but I have plenty of space left on the drive (over 4 gigs even with a couple of iso image files I am temporarily carrying). It nice to have a good toolbox when a family member or friend asks you to fix their computer. The biggest problem with this many tools is remembering which tools you have and what they do!

~ by Sumo on May 3, 2008.