I have an old U3 flash drive, which has only 1G capacity. This kind of a device can mount two drives simultaneously - one is a conventional flash drive (read/write) and one is a CDROM drive (read-only). Usually users does not care the CDROM partition and sometimes even remove it totally to spare more space from the conventional partition.
However, recently triggered by a corporate customer's site requirement that conventional flash drive is disabled but CDROM ia allowed (thanks to its read-only feature), I start to think whether I can re-use my old U3 drive for that purpose.
The first step is to create an ISO file, which should be a well-known idea if you have ever burned a disk. I choose to use InfraRecorder, because it has no embedded commercial ad and has a portable version to save the installation effort. The following screen shots illustrate the steps to build the ISO file.
Then I download u3tool from SOURCEFORGE.NET. It is a open source tool to manipulate the U3 disk and I find it also work properly in my 64 bit Windows environment as well. The steps are simple:
(i) create the CDROM partition
u3-tool -p <size-of-iso-file> <driver letter o u3-cdrom-without-colon>
e.g. u3-tool -p 42301440 d
(ii) load the iso file
u3-tool -l <iso-filename> <driver letter u3-cdrom-without-colon>
e.g. u3-tool -l unix.iso e
