Last year I had to deal with a lot of computers that gets infected by viruses which spreads through USB drives. Most of my virus cleaning tools are in my USB flash drive and whenever I plug in my USB flash drive into the computer, the pendrive is at risk of being infected by virus or even worst, the cleaning tools gets injected by malicious code, making the cleaning tool a virus itself! My Corsair GT flash drive doesn’t have a write-protect switch, so I researched and found out that I can prevent virus from being infecting my USB flash drive by filling up the empty space so that it will be full and there will be no space for the virus.
There are a couple of utilities plus manual method on how to fill up the space by creating a dummy file from this article. One of such automated tool that I’ve tested before is PenProtector which is a shareware and the official website is no longer selling it. Fortunately there is a replacement for such a tool called USBDummyProtect and it’s complete free.
Basically what USBDummyProtect does is the same as PenProtector. Simply copy the executable file of USBDummyProtect to the USB flash drive. Whenever you want to fill up the empty space, run USBDummyProtect and a “dummy.file” will be created until the drive shows 0 bytes free. There will be a blank command prompt window opened and will auto close when it’s done.
If you need the space, you can either manually delete the dummy.file or double click on the USBDummyProtect.exe which will auto delete the dummy file. There is no graphical user interface for this tool and it’s free. This trick works but the only problem is it may take a long time to create the dummy file if you have a large USB flash drive. I know for a fact I won’t do it on my 128GB Corsair GTR USB flash drive.
You wouldn’t want to use this tool all the time because too much reading and writing will make your USB flash drive wear out faster, or in another words, shorten its lifespan. I personally only use it when I know I am going to use it to fix a computer that has virus problems. Do note that it is important for you to run USBDummyProtect tool on a computer that is free from viruses.
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