is there any way of locking a usb drive. so hat when people click on the drive letter in My Computer it shows a dialog box that requests for them to enter a password. ive looked in google but have found nothing. help would be appreciated.
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To my understanding TrueCrypt hide a large portion of you drive, so you should be able to do something with that and is already portable.
The way to do this that is most useful is a "hardware" solution, that is, something that is built in to the removable drive.
U3 drives have a password protection that appears to work fairly well ... which means, well enough to keep honest people out. It may or may not keep all baddies out. It doesn't encrypt things, so theoretically someone who was able to bypass the lock would be able to read your data.
PortableApps work well with U3 -- after you use the U3 launchpad's password prompt to unlock the drive, launch the regular PAM and off you go. Since u3 is at end-of-life, there may be some good bargains. But remember, it is not super secure.
There are also removable drives with password and usually encryption built in. These drives theoretically run on any OS (Windows, Linux, etc) without installing special drivers. It's the special drivers that get you, since you probably can't install them on a locked down machine. If you use a good pass phrase (10 characters or more, a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters) the encryption should be good enough to keep out even sophisticated hackers.
MC