Software and Manual
Strictly speaking, no software is needed for the USB Bar on any modern operating system bar Windows 98SE, for which a simple driver is needed. Otherwise you just plug it in and wait for your OS to pick it up as a Mass Storage-class device. Windows Me onwards all see it fine, Mac OS 9.1 onwards is happy with it and any Linux kernel released in the last few years shouldn't have a problem either. All good, you get 32MB of FAT32-formatted storage out of the box, for which you can do what you like with.The extra software and (Windows) driver enhances its uses over and above simple removable storage. The driver simply makes the device appear as a "U-Storage" device so the software driver can enumerate it correctly in a sea of possible generic Mass Storage devices you may have connected to your PC.
Then the software is able to talk to it.
Sorry about the tiny image size, I had a hard time getting PSP to spit out larger images with a file size that wasn't rediculous, at good quality.
The software has a few tricks up its sleeve when manipulating the USB Bar. The first that you can see above is the ability to split the Bar into two parts, one public, one private. Data on the public section is fair game to any OS, data on the private section is locked out until you unlock it with the software. A bit of added security but security that means software and driver installation on all systems you need to access the data from, Windows only at this point. I'm sure the data is accessible via other means, it's not 100% theft friendly, but it's a decent way of basic portable data security.
The second resize option lets you have a public/private area, plus a second public area, making the Bar appear as two drives to the OS, with the login/logout caveat, via software, to get access to your private area. Just another extension of the first concept.
When you've got a private area defined and the software loaded, an icon appears in the system tray that gives you simple double-click access to the login and logout part of U-Storage.
Easy peasy and it works well. Note that changing back to a single public partition on the Bar requires a format and you lose all data. Similarly the initial creation of public/private or public/private + public does the same. Resizing the partitions is destructive too, so be careful.
Finally, the U-Storage 2.1 utility lets you make the Bar bootable as a USB-ZIP device, as mentioned previously. The process is a bit convoluted in places, but the manual explains it all clearly, if in Engrish sometimes, the original translation from Chinese not being done terribly well. It's readable though, just pay attention.
Once made bootable (using Windows 98 boot disk files and a modified MBR on the partition, which can't be done when the device is setup with private areas), you have all the remaining storage available for files accessible when you boot. That's the cool part.
