XDA developer sztupy’s USB Host Controller takes advantage of native OTG Host functionality (available in many high-end Android devices) makes it easily accessible for the end user. The app is capable of showing the connected usb devices, and lets you mount external harddisks and connect as mass storage devices to the filesystem.
It does most of things very well and it has the ability to reload partition tables and reseting USB devices. It can also control the USB Host functionality of S5PC210 devices with the appropriate kernel patch.

USB Host API was made available for 3.x and above Android devices, but this app doesn’t depend on it and hence can run on older android 2.x devices, but requires root access.

If your device doesn’t have native USB OTG functionality, there are kernel patches for some older devices to enable the functionality, most notably for:

• 5PC210 based Samsung phones (Galaxy S, Captivate, Nexus S)
• QSD8250 based HTC phones (G1, Nexus One, Desire, Incredible)

You can find appropriate kernel drivers for these phones here:
- Hummingbird / Samsung phones
- Snapdragon / HTC phones

USB Host Controller mode on Samsung Galaxy S [Video]:

App ran well on Galaxy S, galaxy SII, Galaxy Note in our tests.

To give it a try, download USB Host controller from Android Market.

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Koushik dutta, a developer, has figured out a way to bypass this Tether detection used by AT&T, sprint, and others. He released an app which offers user “undetectable tethering” and the app is called  ClockworkMod Tether Alpha.

ClockworkMod Tether doesn’t need your Android phone to be rooted, and allows Windows, Mac and Linux users to utilize the 3G or 4G LTE connection of an Android as if it were a proxy, as opposed to a Wifi/ usb access point router. Technically, it actually spoof carriers checking for the TTL (Time To Live) data coming from a desktop, which is unique for every OS. It modifies the IP packets transferring from PC and changes the TTL values in the TCP/IP header.

The computer app installs a virtual connection which understands how to communicate with the proxy on the phone.

However, app will self-destruct on 7th January 2012 in order to encourage users to purchase the paid the version. Bluetooth tethering is also in the pipeline.

Go ahead and try the Alpha version from here on Google+ post.

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FXI technologies has prepared a USB stick-sized portable computer prototype, powered by a dual-core 1.2-GHz Samsung Exynos ARM CPU (same as in the Galaxy S II), 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out and a microSD card slot for memory. Its merely 21 gram and enables “Any Screen Computing,” the ability to turn any TV, laptop, phone, tablet, or set-top box into a dumb terminal for its Android operating system.

Cotton Candy has a USB 2.0 connector on one end and an HDMI jack on the other. When connected to an HDTV, it uses the HDMI port for video, the USB for power, and Bluetooth to connect to a keyboard, mouse, or tablet for controlling the operating system. The device outputs 1080p from its Android 2.3 operating system and is powerful enough to play 1080p video or stream HD clips from the Web.

When USB is connected to a PC / Mac, you can launch Cotton Candy’s Android environment in a secure window while you use your desktop OS outside the window. You can even transfer files between your notebook’s native OS, just like you would do with USB pen drive.

The device will be able to connect to tablets, smartphones, and even set top boxes via USB or Bluetooth. It will be able to turn even an iPhone or an iPad into a terminal for its environment – Android running on iPhone!

Ideally, it should be connected with a USB hub to connect directly to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to launch its OS. Its a good thing to have on the go, while you are at work or office.

Future versions of Cotton candy would run ARM flavors of Linux like Ubuntu and even ARM version of Windows 8. USB 3, and Tegra 3 are also in the queue.

There’s no price for Cotton Candy yet but when produced in the market, would be less than $200. Awesome deal for PC ont he go.

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Official statement:

You need Snow Leopard to install, you can’t upgrade directly from any other polder version.

What This guide will let you achieve:

• Clean install or upgrade any Mac installation.
• Another reason to use this guide is if you have no or slow internet. Offline Installations of Mac OS X Lion.

How to Make OS X Lion Bootable USB, DVD disk

Step 1. (When released) Purchase and download OS X Lion from the Mac App Store. Locate the Lion installer (should be in your downloads) and right-click and select “Show Package Contents.”

Step 2. Navigate inside the “Contents/SharedSupport” and inside locate the installer, “InstallESD.dmg”.

Step 3. Copy “InstallESD.dmg” to the desktop.

Step 4. (For DVD disk) Open Disk Utility, Click on the Burn button. browse and select “InstallESD.dmg”
Now insert a blank (singlelayer) 4.7GB DVD and wait for the disk to burn.

Step 5. (USB disk drive) Insert your USB pendrive and Open DiskUtility. Select your pendrive from left menu and click on the “restore” tab on the right. Browse and select the “InstallESD.dmg” you kept on dekstop and click Restore.

You are all set! You can use this USB pendrive, DVD disc to make installations on any mac, macbook and work as an original one.

Related: Install OS X Lion on PC

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If you know about HDMI, USB 3.0, you might actually feel the inferiority of those technologies, as LightPeak takes over.

LightPeak is Intel proprietary Optical cable interface to connect peripheral bus giving throughputs upto 10Gigabit/s and have a potential of extending to 100Gb/s over a period of next few years.  At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds. Optical technology also allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner, and more flexible cables than currently possible. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations, and more.

A typical computer system involves a large number of interfaces namely SATA, SCSI, USB, Firewire, PCI Express – each one dedicated to its scope with limited bandwidth capabilities. LightPeak would clear of this mess by providing one unified interface to connect almost anything – whether it’s a Display panel/Monitor or a external/internal harddrive, they all work on LightPeak, and they work much faster than before.

Apart from unifying communications, it would make interfaces cheaper Light Peak, unlike most fiber ICs, was designed to be lithographically created directly on a CMOS IC, which can reduce size and manufacturing costs. However, the LightPeak will not replace existing HDMI, DisplayPort technologies immediately, it would be gradual.

The Light Peak cable contains a pair of optical fibers (each 62.5 micron wide) that are used for upstream and downstream traffic. This means that Light Peak offers a maximum of 10 Gbit/s in each direction at the same time i.e. 10Gbps Full duplex. The maximum length of the cable can run upto 100meters, requiring repeaters beyond that.

Since LightPeak cables has decent max length, they have also been looked as 10Gigabit Ethernet killers. 10Gigabit ethernet is way more costly, but its hard to actually transition all future networks to a new physical layer.

Apple’s Thunderbolt Technology

Apple is doing a rebranding for the LightPeak technology to Thunderbolt High Speed I/O. The rumor gears are really starting to churn with regard Apple’s upcoming MacBook Pro refresh and now we have a purported leak of the upcoming spec sheet for the new 13-inch model. The Thunderbolt port would look much like the Mini DisplayPort but has a tidy little lightning logo next to it.

Update: Apple has announced new MacBook Pros with Thunderbolt technology.

“The new MacBook Pro brings next generation dual and quad Core processors, high performance graphics, Thunderbolt technology and FaceTime HD to the great design loved by our pro customers,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Thunderbolt is a revolutionary new I/O technology that delivers an amazing 10 gigabits per second and can support every important I/O standard which is ideal for the new MacBook Pro.”

Imagine accessing multiple streams of uncompressed HD video — from your notebook — at speeds that let you edit an HD feature film in real time. That’s how Thunderbolt technology will connect the next generation of high-performance peripherals to the next generation of computers — starting with MacBook Pro. Ultrafast and ultraflexible, the Thunderbolt pipeline is more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and it offers unprecedented expansion capabilities. It changes what you can do on a notebook.

The Thunderbolt port will give you plug-and-play performance with a whole new world of Thunderbolt peripherals, as well as with the Apple LED Cinema Display and other Mini DisplayPort peripherals. You can daisy-chain as many as six devices, including your display. And with support for video and eight-channel audio, it’s easy to connect HDMI-compatible devices — like your TV and home stereo — using the HDMI adapter you already have. Current VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort adapters are also supported.

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Predator, an application for windows, locks your system when you are not there, even if your Windows session is still opened. It uses  a regular USB flash drive as an access control device.

Simply Download and install Predator, and pair a USB drive with it. With the USB drive plugged in, you can continue to work, but as soon as it is removed, the screen fades and your PC locks, and keyboard/mouse input is disabled. Plug it back in, and normal usage is restored.

Features:

• Can be unlocked with a custom password in case USB is lost.
• Alarm is triggered if wrong password is entered.
• All events are logged, you will know if intruders have tried to use your PCs.
• The Security codes recorded on your USB drive are frequently changed. Even if someone clones your USB, you are still safe.

Install And Configure Predator:

• First download Predator from here, install it & launch it
• A window will open to set up password and request for USB flash drive insertion, click OK.

• Now you are on Preference window, configure all settings and create a Key.

• Click OK to save you settings.

Now restart  Predator to monitor your system. And you are now secure!

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These days, the most popular topic is the Xbox Kinect hacks and here we’ve a guide on How to Reverse engineer a USB.

USB is a very complex protocol, much more complicated than Serial or Parallel, SPI and even I2C. USB uses only two wires but they are not used as ‘receive’ and ‘transmit’ like serial, data is bidirectional and differential. What that means is that the data sent depends on the difference in voltage between the two data lines D+ and D-.

The fact that USB is also very structured makes it hackable, easy to reverse engineer —  Its easy to grab the format of packets agreed upon and you don’t have to bother about checksums, they are pretty much abstract. Since every computer now made has a USB host core, that does a lot of the tough work for you, and there are many software libraries to assist you in doing a lot with USB.

How to Reverse Engineer Xbox Kinect Motor:

First thing first, you will need a Linux or Mac machine to get your first hands on USB debugging. Both these unix environments has a powerful tool called lsusb.

For linux, run lsusb -vv (ultra verbose) for Mac, run system_profiler SPUSBDataType

First thing you will have to grab  is this PID, VID. Every type USB device must have a unique VID and PID. The VID is the manufacturer. In this case, 0x045e is the VID for Microsoft. All Microsoft products will have that VID. Each product has a different PID, so all Kinect Motors use PID 0x02b0 this doesn’t differ between two Kinects, they’ll both have the same PID.

Second thing that goes is the descriptor. A descriptor is a sort of ‘menu’ of what the device can do and how it likes to transfer data. In general, each device has one descriptor.

Learning in detail:

You can read the complete detailed guide at ladyada. It goes into depth on how USB works, how to record the communication, what to look for, how to deconstruct what you’ve found, and how to put it all to use. This is all done with real world data from the Kinect so you could easily follow along at home.  There is source code available so you can download example and see how to control the device as well.

This a great tutorial. I’m sure you can become a good usb hacker by the time you are done reading it.

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What you need is a way to Mount iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad as USB drive in Windows or Mac OS X,with Phone Disk.

With Phone Disk installed, your computer actually finds the iOS device in “disk mode.”, rather than the regular iTunes mode. After connecting, you are able to see the majority of your phone’s file contents, and can use any spare storage space on it as a straight-up portable drive.

The app enables high-speed usb data transfers. I’ve tested 7-8mbps for iPhone 4. What’s yours?

The app is available for Free until Dec. 1, so hurry up.

Phone Disk

Trojans, viruses, malware are everywhere. They find new ways to enter our sacred computers some way or the other. Talking about scenarios where hacker had physical access, traditionally, lame Autorun based USBs could install unwanted programs on your PCs the moment they are plugged, but those are easy to get rid of: Switch off autoplay. What if a USB uses a cross-platform native profile to inject malicious programs into computers? — It becomes unstoppable.

One such device was demoed at this year’s Shmoocon, it’s called “Phantom Keystroker”. It’s a simple USB dongle form factor device, which when plugged to a computer uses USB HID class to identify itself as a Human interface mouse and keyboard from a  legit manufacturer and start execution of instructions, which would perhaps annoy the user by flashing LEDs on keyboards, and make the mouse behave as drunkard.

Since USB HID doesn’t need any drivers across all popular platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS), it just works everywhere.

Hak5 team has extrapolated the idea with USB HID device to allow executing terminal commands quickly, without drawing as much attention from the user who sits in front of it. The user just turns his head for couple of seconds and  the hacker plugs in their programmable USB key stroke dongle, Boom! All sorts of command could be run.

Why this behavior is Not considered “Bad” by Current Anti-viruses

When we plug-in such USB HID device, it acts just like any other USB peripheral. It could identify itself as aLogitech HID keyboard, or a HID compliant Mouse. The moment it identifies itself, your computer assumes its you who is typing/clicking and has no idea about “these devices” being automated.

Daren and Snubs from Hak5 had been working on such a project they call as “USB Rubber Ducky” with a soft duck attached at the Dongle.

How this can be done?

It could start with a cool Arduino hack, but implementing a USB HID with the standard Arduino is a bit of a pain (atleast for me). The alternative way (read  as “Better”)  is to use Teensy, which lets you program  in C, or the easier Arduino development environment, and already supported USB HID out of the box! With the price tag of  $18, its ultra-affordable for enthusiasts and nightmare for potential victims.

When teensy is interfaced with a flash card, it could store multiple programs, which can then be dynamically loaded instead of reflashing the device everytime when you need to perform a different task. Also, one can store a large number of files/scripts that let you do more.

Watch the Video, from Hak5: (video automatically starts from 12:xx, where main talk starts)

The possiblities are endless. You can create a CRON Job or schedule events to happen in a later time. e.g. running a script at a time in the future when it downloads and install a keylogger or perhaps damage/steal local files. Or it could be an instantaneous Auto-job that copies all executables from the USB flash for running on the local computer.

What other Bad things are Possible:

• Automate Brute-force Admin passwords on Windows server (Windows 2003 server doesn’t lockout when passwords are entered from keyboard, in our case USB HID device)
• Brute-force BIOS passwords
• Fake a BSOD and do anything in the background. Before User reboots PC (i.e. couple of seconds) damage is probably done.
• Add a user to the box or the domain.( this is nasty)
• Run a program that sets up a permanent back door.
• Copy files to flash card
• Go to a website they have a cookie for, and do some sort of transaction.

Possibilities are endless, use your wild imagination.

How about Good things?

Apart from being an un-avoidable bad element, it can be a great pen-tester’s device and even an automation device. It could:

• Automate Pen-testing tasks
• Perform certain tasks much faster than you can type, and that too without typos.
• Schedule tasks

Potential Shortcomings?

There is one disadvantage, though its not big. The first time you plugin the device, it takes few seconds (5-20s) to identify HID device and load the drivers. Though this is fully automated by all operating systems, this delay varies from OS to OS.

You can contribute

Obviously, there can be other good reasons why this project should go futher. If you’ve some brilliant ideas and happen to be a strong C, Arduino programmer, you can contribute to this project by filling a form at hak5 to register to receive a Free USB Rubber Ducky dev kit. Devkits will be delivered via via snail-mail around the world.

Related: Arduino Alternative : Android based DIY projects

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In this guide, we will walk you through all the possible ways:

1. Create Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 Bootable USB

2. Create Live Portable USB  Windows XP

3. Create Bootable USB for Ubuntu, and all other Linux Distros

UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:

• Backtrack, a linux distro  for network analysis and penetration testing.
• Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
• Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
• Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
• Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
• FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.
• Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
• NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.

The Windows and Linux version are very similar in UI. Run the executable, and select a distribution, floppy/hard disk image, or kernel/initrd to load, select a target drive (USB Drive or Hard Disk), then reboot once done.

Before rebooting, make sure you set this USB drive as active.

DISKPART > list disk
> select disk 1  --> replace "1" with your USBdisk #
> select partition 0
> active

Now reboot and go to the BIOS settings and change the startup order to boot from USB, you should boot into OS installer/Live boot into OS.

4. Creating Bootable USB in Mac OS X (Leopard or higher) using DiskUtil

1. Open a Terminal, Insert your flash media and run diskutil list again and determine the device node assigned to your flash media (e.g. /dev/disk2)
2. Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN
3. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/diskN bs=1m
4. Run diskutil eject /dev/diskN and remove your flash media when the command completes

Also check Make Bootable USB [OSx86, Snow Leopard]

We keep on posting such extensive Tutorials in our guides section: Follow us @taranfx if you need any Assistance or more Tips n Tricks.

As we prompted earlier, SuperSpeed USB delivers data transfer rates up to 10x faster than Hi-Speed USB and offers optimized power efficiency, increased power delivery and backward compatibility with the billions of USB-enabled computers and devices currently in use. The assortment of certified SuperSpeed USB products represents end-to-end solutions for consumers wanting the fastest USB experience available.

SuperSpeed USB product page on the USB-IF Web site highlights most of the products getting the certification.

The most deserving devices in the list are HP’s Envy 15 laptop and WD’s My Book 3.0 (not WD My book ii)external hard drive, but that the vast majority are adapters says a lot about how early this format is. Of the 50 said to be certified only 45 are listed on the site, meaning there are five left unidentified, ready for a stunning, blue-plugged unveiling.

We write Latest in Hardware: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Research,Gadgets: Android, iPhone, Apple, Google andTech Guides, Tech News @taranfx on Twitter and:

• Faster Installation
• Installation for Netbooks/Smartbooks which have no optical drive
• Damaged/faulty optical drive.
• More reliable way of installation

Whatever your reason is, here’s how you can proceed with making bootable USB.

Note: This guide can be used for installation of both Native/Hackintosh Retail Snow Leopard OR OSx86 distro like Leopard Kalyway 10.5.6 and SnowOSX v3.x Snow Leopard. In other words no matter what version of Mac OS X you wish to install via USB, this method works.

The credit goes to holyfield for his basic guide. This guide is much more simplified and illustrated making it truly feasable for just any one to perform it.

Before you begin, Make sure you have the following ready with you:

• A USB stick of size equal or greater than the OSx86 distro (8GB or higher will work with all)
• OSx86 Distro (like SnowOSX, Kalyway, iPC, iDeneb, etc) or RETAIL Snow Leopard Disc which you wish to install.
• A Running Mac OS X (hackintosh or Native)
• OSx86 Tools Download from Google Code

Step 1. Prepairing USB Thumb Stick:

Open Disk Utility from Applications > Utilities > DiskUtility.

If creating Disk for Native Snow Leopard:

Erase the disk with “Mac OS X (Journaled)” and the click Erase.

If Creating for OSx86/ Hackintosh:

Select your USB drive click “Partition” Tab. Change Volume Scheme to “1 Partition”.  Select Format “Mac OS X (Journaled)” with Partition map scheme “MBR” under “options” and Apply.

Step 2. Restoring Snow Leopard/ OSx86 Disc/ISO/DMG to USB drive

Insert your retail Snow Leopard/OSx86 Disc or mount the ISO/DMG you wish to use. Click “Restore” and select source and destination as shown below. I’m using My HP 16gb Usb named “Taranfx” in t he example below:

Hit Restore. This would take anywhere between 10 minutes (if using ISO/dmg) and 30 minutes (using DVD).

Step 3. Making the USB Bootable [Not applicable if your are installing Native Snow Leopard]

Now run the OSx86 Tools that you downloaded initially. Select “Install EFI/Run FDISK”  and then select disk to use i.e. USB and “EFI to install” followed by “Install EFI” as shown below:

That’s all. Enable USB boot in BIOS and reboot from USB, your installation should begin.

We keep on posting new Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Hackintosh. You can stay in touch with updates @taranfx on Twitter.

If you are installing OSx86 Hackintosh, you can check our guides:

• How to Install Snow Leopard [VMWare]
• How to Install SnowOSX Universal
• Install Snow Leopard RETAIL on PC [USB]
• How to Install Snow Leopard on PC [OSx86]
• Understanding MAC OSx86 for Dummies
• Install Mac OS X Leopard on PC [Leopard 10.5.6]

How to Install Chrome OS [VMWare VirtualBox]

Tip: If you are totally new to chrome OS: What is Chrome OS – Everything you need to know.

If you have tried Virtualized version and doubted the speed, you must give the USB version a try:

Download [torrent]

Here’s how to Write the Image on the USB:

For Windows:
Unzip using WinRar, Download Image Writer and launch it, select the image (chromiumos.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.

For Mac:
Firstly, unmount the drive you want to install Chromium OS to. Place the downloaded file onto your desktop. Open System Profiler, click USB on the list at the side and then select the entry that represents your USB disk. Now look for the BSD Name column (http://bit.ly/5mG4WK). Remember what is written here. In my case, it is disk1, but in yours it may be different. Take care here as if you get it wrong, it could seriously mess things up. Once you have this, open up Terminal and
type the following commands.

cd Desktop
tar -zxvf chromiumos.tar.gz
cd chromiumos

For the next command, replace X with the name of the disk you found earlier, ie disk1.

sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4m

This command will ask you to enter your password (the same one you enter when installing
software for example), type it in and press enter. This command will take a while to run,
about 20 minutes for me, and then will give you your shell prompt back once it has finished.
Once it has, you can remove your USB drive and boot from it (but not on your Mac because
I’ll tell you now that won’t work, yes I tried it)

Troubleshooting:

If It says “Resource Busy“!, You forgot to dismount the drive. Do this, then retype the command and you should be fine.

For Linux:
Extract chromiumos.img and run the following command in the same directory as the file, where X is the device name of your USB drive.

sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4M

Once the command finishes, you can then boot from the USB drive.

[credits: hexxeh]

How many times you lost your patience while burning DVD/CD for each installation? You don’t need to do that.

The Era of silly DVD/ CD is totally phased out, and will be replaced by BluRay Drives in the near future.

So, What is the best and the Fastest way of installation?
Its USB drive! (Flash or External HDD). Here’s what you need to do. It’s simple but don’t make any blunders.

UPDATE: This guide has been updated to support all windows Installations.

Method1: Using WinToFlash (Easier)

Step 1. download WinToFlash from here and unzip.

Mount the Windows installation image (using PowerISO) or if you have installation DVD/CD, then well and good.

Step 2. Run the exe

Step 3. Select the source and target drive and hit next.

There you go, it`ll finish up automatically with a bootable USB.

Reboot into BIOS. Change settings to Enable “Boot from USB”, and give it the highest precedence. Save settings and reboot, You would reboot into installation.

Method 2: via inbuilt DiskPart (Harder) Try this only if you have problems with Method 1

Step 1. Preparing USB drive

Open command prompt, from Start > run > cmd. If you are on vista or Windows 7, you might need to run it as elevated administrator. You can do this by creating shortcut to “cmd” on desktop then right click > “Run as Administrator”.

Enter following commands -

> Diskpart

DISKPART> LIST DISK

Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
——–  ————-  ——-  ——-  —  —
Disk 0    Online           93 GB    13 MB
Disk 1    Online           8 GB    6 MB

Note down the number corresponding Disk number. 1 in my case

DISKPART> SELECT DISK 1

>CLEAN
>CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
>SELECT PARTITION 1     – This 1 remains same always.
>ACTIVE
>FORMAT FS=FAT32
>ASSIGN
>EXIT

Step 2. Copy Installed CD/DVD contents to USB drive

> xcopy e:\*.* /s/e/f f:\

where e:\ is your source DVD drive, f:\ is target USB drive

Step 3.Changing BIOS Settings

Reboot into BIOS. Change settings to Enable “Boot from USB”, and give it the highest precedence. Save settings and reboot, You would reboot into installation.

Wasn’t that easy? You can try More How To Guides Below -

How to Run Live Windows XP from a Portable USB Drive (Memory Stick)

Earlier we had shown you how to make Firefox portable. Here comes a quick one for Google Chrome.

PortableApps.com—the folks who convert just about every popular application to a portable one you can carry with you on your thumb drive—have just released Google Chrome Portable 3.0, the portable version of Chrome’s latest stable release.

Finally, if you’re planning to use Chrome Portable as your default browser, use DefaultBrowser [Windows XP only]. DefaultBrowser is a simple utility that allows you to set a portable browser as your system default and easily reverse the process when necessary.

Chrome Portable is a free download, Windows only: Download or visit: homepage

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The Cables To Go has come up with a  Wireless USB Superbooster Extender  that allows users to wirelessly connect a USB device such as a printer, scanner, camera  to their PC or laptop and access it from up to 150 feet away. The good thing about this wireless is that it doesn’t need the “line of sight” and hence can work across walls, rooms.

The device creates its own Wireless network between the host adapter and the device adapter, which also takes ccare of eliminating any interference if multiple offices by using proper Hopping algorithm(DSSS), and yes, it’s not standard 802.11abg Wifi.

Specs: USB 1.1 (don’t expect good data transfers over it)

wireless: 2.4 GHz, Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS)

With USB 3.0 coming, USB 1.1 looks so outdated.

Price is bit on the higher side,$189.99. But I guess good for those who need it.You can buy it here.

Now you have one more reason to love XP — It’s portable, bootable LIVE from USB drive.

The idea of XP LIVE USB is interesting and infact very easy provided you follow the instructions below -

The good thing about this method is, you don’t need hefty 700mb XP installer, its pretty small -54MB

Download here and proceed with instructions:

Step 1. Un-Rar the file and you will get 7 extracted files. The first 2 files are the manual in Germany & Russian language. You might not found the English documentation because bartPE seems developed by a Germany. First of all, we need to provide a USB stick with minimal size of 256MB. Incase you are wondering what the heck is BartPE- It’s a utility using which this image is built. The process of creating BartPE image is complex, and I’m not discussing about it here.

Step 2. Then, make a fresh quick format with hpusbfw.exe tool included in the packages. Format using this utility with the settings shown in the image below.

Step 3. After the format is done, Copy all the files from a folder on USB stick. Reboot the system & make sure that you enable the USB boot giving USB higher precedence in BIOS settings – while the USB memory  is still plugged in. Let the computer boot from it. The boot process speed depends upon your USB storage speed. It was pretty decent for me.

Step 4. There’s no step 4, when you boot into windows, You are done.

The default desktop background is covered by dark bartPE pictures. In the left corner are showing up a “Go” button — representing a Start button in a real Windows. Click on it, it will raise a list of simple menu pointing to the default applications such as Windows Wordpad, the Calculator program, Paint image editor & a file manager called A43 replacing the Windows Explorer instead.

Note that this USB live also equipped with the fully functionality of command prompt. It’s DOS is actually same as the one from a real Windows XP.

Look at the picture below, “About” link from Paint program

It shows you exact same About page as the one you might found in a real Windows XP. However, it is in Germany. Don’t worry about that. Anyway, you don’t even want to read it.

It has great advantages, eg: portability, In emergency-to rescue the system,etc. it’s NOT legally allowed to do so, do it at your own risk.

Happy Portability!

Firefox 3.5 Portable Edition is officially available for download. checkout the detailed Install guide here. Installation and use is easy, requires few user tweaks mentioned in the guide, its not full self-installation.

This download is from PortableApps.com which are famous for their previous Portable Apps Suite. which bundles all the popular OpenSource softwares.

The host controller is a chip which connects the host system such as a PC to external storage, peripherals or other systems, and NEC’s new host controller (µPD720200) is based on the SuperSpeed USB standard which was finalized in November of 2008, more than eight years after the USB 2.0 spec was released.

Like the solar-powered charger, this pedal-powered charger is based off the previously mentioned MintyBoost charger (which is simply powered by AA batteries). As opposed to the MintyBoost, which is built to be as easy to assemble as possible, the geek quotient that lies within this Instructable is high. That said, if you’ve got the chops, time, and cash to pull it off (the motor they used cost a whopping $275), it’s a really fun idea.

How to Charge Any USB Device by Riding Your Bike [Instructables]