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Home » Security » Anti-virus » How to protect pendrive from virus ? prevent the entry of virus to your USB drive and increase it’s speed of perfomance by formating it in NTFS file system and making as ‘Read Only’

How to protect pendrive from virus ? prevent the entry of virus to your USB drive and increase it’s speed of perfomance by formating it in NTFS file system and making as ‘Read Only’

Pen drives (memory sticks / USB drives / thumb) ranges it’s storage capacity from 64MB to 256GB, They are very small in external size and It has no harm even in scratches or dusts.So, thereby it’s very handy and portable.As most of all computers supports USB, There wasn’t even the need of an extra plot for using this device.These all qualifications made it very popular and the most common storage device among the people.

Other than CD/DVD, the chance for VIRUS (full form : Vital Information Resource Under Siege) infection is great on these devices.As CD/DVD are ‘read only’ devices, Infection is only possible from the computer which it was written.But in case of Pen drives,It allows you to read and write information, so it could be affected by virus from any computer, it has been inserted.As new and new viruses are being generated in every seconds, your anti-virus may not be able to find these viruses.So, there is a possibility for severe loss of data stored in it.You may loss them even if you remove the virus.It’s really hard to escape from this also.So what can you do to get rid of this situation ??

“Prevention is better than Cure” – You may have heard this.This is the right way.Prevent the entry of virus.It’s the easiest and safest way to defend the Virus.The reason why pen drives are affected by virus is because of the ‘read and write property’ of it.We can make the USB device ‘read only’ and then no data can be entered into that pen drive, other than from your PC.i.e, data can be entered into the pen drive only from your computer.You can follow the simple steps described below to make your pen drive ‘read only’.You just want to do the hack in the reverse order to make it again a ‘read and write’ device.



Q : How Protect your USB / flash / thumb / pen drive from Virus by Making your Drive ‘Read Only’ to all other computers expect yours.


A :Format it With NTFS File system

As per default, windows doesn’t provide the option to format your pen drive in NTFS system, it ony supports the FAT32 file system. (see the screenshot),But we can change it.

  • Right click on My computer and open the system ‘properties‘ window
  • Select The ‘Hardware‘ Tab and select the ‘Device Manager’ From it
  • Expand (+) the Disk Drive from it
  • Select the Name of your Pendrive From the list
  • Right click on the pen drive and select the properties from the window shown.
  • Now a New window will come
  • Select the tab called policies from it
  • There you will see two options Optimize for quick Removal and Optimize for performance.By default The Optimize for quick removal will be checked.Change it and check on the Optimize for performance.
  • Now click OK
  • Now select your USB drive,[ eg: from my computer – (H:)your USB name ] and right click on it
  • select ‘format’ option
  • A new window will come showing the formatting options.
  • Select the file system as NTFS from it.
  • Click on Start
  • Done !! – :~)

Now it has been formated with NTFS and it’s read only for all other systems expect yours.Only you can add informations to the pendrive.But in case if you want to add datas to the pen drive from any other PC, just change the USB – properties – policies – Optimize for quick Removal.Also, By this trick you can see a great increase in the speed and perfomance of your pen drive too.It’s because it’s now optimized for performance.

NB : Don’t plug out the USB without clicking the ‘Saftly remove…..’ Button.

Thanks to my friend Amal at compting unleashed for advising me to format us in NTFS which led to this post

About Rajeel

I'm Rajeel, a teen blogger from India who loves computers, sports, internet and all other kind of tech stuffs. This blog thing is one of my favourite hobby and the one that eats up much of my time. But Really, I'm loving it :) Find me in G+

13 comments

  1. Increase Website Traffic

    What a nice blog you have..thanks for all this information

  2. its ulimate keep on updating thank you

  3. Ah. After trying. did NOT work as supposed :S

  4. Forgot to mention: tested on Win7 Ultimate x64 and diddn’t work.

  5. hi

    Thanks for the very useful information and it will definitely
    save my pendrive and its data but you haven’t told whether
    the properties of pendrive can be changed from other pc or
    that can be done where it was done earlier.

    Thanking you again for the vital information

  6. i tried the option and pen drive is working faster then earliyer but we can copy any file from other system without changing the option. it is not working as readonly why?

  7. Hi,
    I managed to configure my 1GB Kingston memory stick to NTFS. But when I plugged into a Win7 Pro PC, I was able to save a txt file to it, which means it’s still writable.
    Did I miss any thing?

    regards!
    wats

  8. Very good method ….

  9. Than Q dear

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