I've been using Firefox Portable from within a TrueCrypt volume on a usb drive for a while without problems under XP. When I try this on my new Windows 7 machine, I get the error message described at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Could_not_initialize_the_browser_security_comp...
I've obviously tried the suggestions in that link. Firefox Portable still works fine on my other XP machine, and also works if I copy it to the desktop of my Windows 7 computer, so I guess the problem relates to the way the volume is mounted or something like that. Any ideas?
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Hi, and welcome to the forum
I routinely run FFP from a TC partition from a flash drive on CP/Vista/7 and it all works fine, so it isn't anything fundamental that is broken.
By any chance, is the TrueCrypt partition formatted as NTFS? If so, then it is most likely a security permissions issue.
Hi, and thanks for the welcome!
Yes, it is indeed formatted as NTFS - I originally had it as FAT, but that was causing regular BSODs on my XP netbook due to a driver problem so I switched to avoid the issue. I suspected it was something to do with security permissions - that's the sort of thing I was thinking of in my last sentence, albeit in a much less eloquent way! Is there an easy solution?
Format it FAT!
Seriously! I don't know that this is a way around the NTFS issue. Hopefully, someone can tell you different
So there is no workable solution other than to format it as FAT, therefore making it unusable on my netbook? If so, that limits my use for the portable version if I can't find a way to get it to work on both my computers!
Following from Jimbo's post, I managed to find how to change the security permissions. On the off chance that anyone with a similar issue finds this thread, I went to the Security tab in the Properties of the mounted volume and chose to Allow Full Control for my user account.
Thanks to both Jimbo and Darkbee for the replies!
Ha! I don't think mine was very helpful.
Still, I believe that that FAT32 is preferable over NTFS format on flash drives for multiple reasons, I just don't recall them right now.
Does anyone know if NTFS has some kind of journaling system as part of the spec? That would definitely be a reason not to use it because then it would place extra wear on the drive.
I think the biggest issue is compatibility with other operating systems like Linux and Mac, although this may be a moot point these days as writing to NTFS format from these operating systems is now possible I believe.
if you look at the number of writes that it will take and compare them to the number of writes that it takes on a FAT filesystem, you'll find that it is only a very small increase in the wear.
The main reason not to use NTFS is that it always causes security problems sooner or later - people keep telling me that if you convert it with /nosecurity then you'll be fine, but sadly that just isn't the case.
The /nosecurity flag to convert simply sets the initial permissions state on the root of the drive to be very permissive. It does not in any way prevent future security from being added.
Windows users are all identified by GUIDs, Globally Unique IDentifiers, which means that if you use the drive on two different computers, it is two different users that are accessing it, in spite of them both being you. If one of those windows accounts sets a file there to only be writable by itslef (which isn't an uncommon way to create a file) then the other one will stumble exactly as the OP has seen.
To clean the drive's security up, you can go to the top level, ensure that you set Full Access for Everyone (a built-in special identity), and then tell it to apply the changes to all files and subdirectories. It may take a while, if you have a lot on the drive.
zip it by winRAR on store mode it will run as if it from the computer. of course u will need to update the archive frequently but it will work very fast. by the way FAT32 sucks.