ymarkov: (Default)
[personal profile] ymarkov
Back in 2005 some hacker has figured out how to trick Windows into misreporting total capacity of a flash drive. I only found out about that recently; so when I saw a cheap 8 GB drive on Ebay, I decided to check this out.

These pictures were included in the listing:


I bought it for $7.50 (free shipping) from cckstore78, a Power Seller supposedly in Rochester, New Hampshire.

First off, the 4 kb of used space was occupied by a hidden Autorun.inf - probably a virus loader. Autorun is disabled on my PC, so that's OK. I re-formatted the drive and tested it with Bart's Stuff Test. Sure enough, the drive topped out at 4 GB. (Write speed was 3.2 MB/sec.) Some drives I've read about were sold as 2 GB but were 128 MB...

So how do they do it? And what can I do beside leaving negative feedback? (I actually left neutral, because the price was OK for 4 GB.)

Date: 2008-11-19 04:57 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ymarkov.livejournal.com
Maybe I will contact Ebay, yes.

I do have a couple of boot CDs around, which include Linux boots. And I'm not running Vista, not for as long as I can avoid it.

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Yisroel Markov

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