This may be a silly question, but I appear to be able to use all the portable apps on a thumb drive (usb stick) just fine, but I recently got a little (lol, my first hard drive was a huge 10 mb) 60gb usb hard drive. I am especially not able to run Firefox from that drive. Most of the other apps work although I have not done an extensive test (I downloaded Suite Standard). Firefox seems to fail trying to write back to the drive and immediately shuts down. Is this something inherent in Firefox, something peculiar to Portable Apps or something strange on my end.
The drive is formatted as NTFS and I am using various versions of XP (depending on where I am using the drive.)
Also, would there be some benefit to formatting the drive as fat32 (if i can figure out a way to).
Thanks,
Bob Warner
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All the apps here will run from any device internal or external, hard drive or flash. So, it sounds like something is up with your drive. It could be the PC or the device or the USB port. Even a driver.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
That was really fast, thanks, and pretty specific. Although I have questions about my USB port at home, others can't be having the same problem. The drive is new and checks out good. I'll keep trying though. The USB stick just got too slow when Firefox is caching pages. It can take several minutes.
Bob
happen with a clean install?
I noticed that my Firefox was faster after using a fresh install instead the one I had been using a couple of months.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
I've found the my home system (XP Pro) is marking all of my files read-only on the portable drive. Even if I go in and specifically change that attribute - and verify that it was done, they are still locked down when I try to use it on another computer. The only workaround I've found is to physically copy my PortableApps folder to a new location on the drive, change the names around so that the new folder has the name that the .exe file is targeting, then everything works ok for that session. This has to be repeated every time I go to another computer other than home. It also means that I can't move any of my existing folders around, only copy or delete them. It's been a real pain!
I, too, haven't found a way to format it FAT32, though it WAS a setup option when I got the drive last month.
It's probably a permissions issue with NTFS. It's particularly prevalent on Vista machines (default format a drive with NTFS and they won't let you use them right). You need to format the drive without security.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
how exactly do you do that.
An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
MickeyJ4J
Is this problem related to the issue when you download a zip and find problems because the file properties shows: 'Security: This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect your computer' with a button 'unblock' next to it. (XP Pro)
Probably not as you indicate the files to be read-only.
The only thing of it I could think of is make sure you safely remove the USB drive and have closed the apps, that makes sure the files are not flagged being 'in use'.
Do a Google search for "fat32format.exe", it is a small program (24kb with upx) and runs under Xp. With it you can quickly reformat your external drive from NTFS to Fat32 with a single partition. I have 3 external drives - all 80 Gb and all Fat32 and all with one big partition of 80Gb. I found this after getting tired of so-called computer experts saying that it could not be done in XP. I just copy any of the portable apps that I want to the drives and run them with no problems and it does not matter where n the drive that they go.
is it opensourse would love to know that sounds like a usefull resourse. my friends portable hd is not being recognised by xp so maby this will help him.
An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
MickeyJ4J
sorry i have tryed to follow the instructions but wont find the file to do it so i am going to do it thru windows xp default hard drive format.
swissKniff is another one i am trying out i will get back to you once i tested.
An Old Irish Blessing
May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
MickeyJ4J
I'm now running Portable Apps from a FAT32-formatted drive. This is my fourth external HD drive (30gb, 120gb, 160gb, and now 320gb) that I've used. All came as FAT32 drives so I didn't have to reformat any of them. They have included bare (Maxtor and Toshiba) drives installed into separately purchased cases (different brands) and 2 Western Digital portable drives. (All are still in use, hand-me-downs to my relatives.)
I've used these drives and applications from WinXP SP2/SP3, Vista, Xandros Linux, and PCLinuxOS.
I'm guessing from that and the immediately previous comment that the problem is associated with NTFS.
I reformated my NTFS drive as FAT32 over the weekend. Reloaded all software in exactly the same config as before. It all works flawlessly on my work computer, where before it did not.
This probably needs to be communicated to the general group, doncha think?
I reformatted my WD Passport 120gig to NTFS on my XP system when I first got it and have used it for months with absolutely no permissions problems.
There must be something else particular to your system that got "fixed" by the FAT32 switch.
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
Are you using your Passport on systems where you don't have admin rights? I believe that is probably the issue several of us are running into.
When I used my NTSF setup on my home system, or on a friend's system that doesn't have things 'locked down' so to speak, it's fine.
However, when I took it to work and tried to use it with the office computer, where my user rights are severely limited, I got errors like Firefox crashing, which were 'fixed' by copying the portableapps files to a new location on the drive. This 'fix' worked only for the current session, then it was all to do over again the next time.
Since I never had this issue with my FAT32 thumbdrive, I inferred that switching to FAT32 on my big drive might fix the problem, which it has.
and therefore yes it is question of rights, but also of the filesystem. FAT32 has no mechanism for setting rights to files, NTFS and other systems like Linux ext2 , ext3 etc are able to manage rights.
I made following experince:
when someone formats usb stick in NTFS all seems to work. This is mainly due to the fact, that it is marked as removable drive from beginning by windows, and the formating from the windows GUI will happen without the security, that means the rights bits for the files are kind of disregarded.
When however someone has a hard drive, formats it NTFS while it is recognized by windows as normal hard drive, copies files to it from the PC, the rights will be set according the current settings on the PC. On such drive, files have rights assigned and can not be handled by other users so simply.
Drives attached to PC, but formated NTFS from a boot cd partitioning utility like acronis or partition magic and similar, behave also flexibel when after connected to an USB adapter. They are then becoming removable and it seems that in such case windows does not copy the rights assingment then.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I appreciate the breakdown of what's causing the problem. I had noticed that my system was not showing the drive as removable when I checked "My Computer" or the WinXP Disk Management utility. I'm not a power user with hardware or multi-user environments, so I'm way outside my comfort zone with the hardware/permissions side of the equation.
As I said earlier, you'll probably have more inquiries of this type as people move from a thumb-drive to a portable hard drive (they've gotten so cheap!)