Lazybit

Voyager is a bundle that includes a portable email client, and Private Disk. The latter is used to encrypt the email archive, to make sure no one can read your messages if you lose the disk, or if it ends up being stolen. Ther are two flavours of Voyager, the 256 MB one and the 2 GB one; no matter which one you have, sooner or later you will need more space. That can be done easily by migrating your email archive to a bigger removable disk.

1. It is assumed that both USB flash disks are ready; the original one is E:, and the new one is F:
2. Start Private Disk
3. Do not mount your image, instead go to Recovery and press Backup, to create a "compressed, encrypted, password protected backup copy of the Private Disk"
4. Choose a backup file and an encryption password (this password can be, and should be different from the password of the original image; although nothing will break if you use the same password)
5. Create a new encrypted disk, it should be located in F:\image.dpd
6. • Naturally, the new image must be larger than the original one, so that there is plenty of room for new emails
   • The new image should not occupy the flash disk entirely, leave at least 10 MB of space for other data
7. Go back to the Recovery tab and press Restore to "restore the data from a previously made copy of the Private Disk"
8. Select the destination image (F:\image.dpd) and enter the password
9. Choose the backup file made at step #4 and enter its password
10. After the process is done, copy all the files and directories (except image.dpd) from E: to F:

If you did everything correctly, you will see the following in F:

• PD, directory
• autorun.inf
• RunMe.exe
• image.dpd

Done! You will probably want to go through an additional step, and customize these settings of the encrypted image:

• Autorun, to launch Z:\Voyager\Voyager.exe automatically
• Autofinish, to run Z:\Voyager\tbExit.exe automatically when the disk is dismounted
• Disk Firewal - enable it and add the trusted applications (if any) to the white list. Remember that every program inside the virtual disk is trusted by default

If you have a USB flash drive, then it is very likely that at some point in time you were interested in adding an autorun option, so that a program would start whenever the flash drive is plugged in. After several experiments, you probably concluded that it's not going to work, especially if you've read Microsoft's FAQ for driver developers.

The interesting fact is that somehow I actually managed to make it work. I haven't yet determined the key-factor which decides whether USB autorun will work or not, but the good old autorun.inf in the root directory approach still works. Apparently, USB autorun is allowed in XP SP2 (so SP2 is the key-factor), but I am not sure about that one yet.

So how does it work?
- create a blank autorun.inf in the root directory of the thumbdrive
- edit it with a text editor, the contents should be:


[autorun]
OPEN=PD\PrvDisk.exe /minimize /path:image.dpd /symbol:Z /RD
ICON=RunMe.exe
ACTION=Mount Private Disk


Notes:

• ICON is an optional parameter, and it can be removed
• OPEN should not be tied to any paths, use relative paths if you want to make sure that USB autorun will work correctly on computers that have a different number of drives and drive letters
• ACTION can be customized, you can use any text

What is RunMe.exe you ask? In this case it is the EXE file the icon of which is used to represent the thumbdrive in the list of drives in My Computers. You can use an .ICO file for such purposes too.

However, RunMe.exe has another (more important) role. If autorun is disabled on a specific computer, you will not see the autorun menu when the thumbdrive is plugged in, hence the application will not start automatically. In that case you will be forced to explore the drive and run the program manually. But what if you need to launch the program with specific command line parameters? Open a console window and type the parameters there? Or use a .BAT script to do the same task?

The problem with BAT files is that you'll see a DOS window once the target application was launched, this window will have to be closed manually - and that takes time, and will soon become a very annoying procedure. RunMe solves this task by processing the autorun.inf file and running the program indicated in the OPEN section, along with its command line parameters [if any]. This will spare you from the tedious task of closing a console window (inexperienced users might not do that, being afraid of the consequences of an action they don't understand).

If autorun.inf is missing, or it contains invalid parameters (for instance - the path is invalid), the program will silently quit, without throwing any obscure error messages which can scare the hell out of newbies.
Follow this link to download RunMe USB autorun.