You will need:

* Any USB thumb drive.
* The latest version of TrueCrypt (4.1 when this was written)
* Any text editor, notepad will do.

There is no need to install TrueCrypt using the installed that comes with it. Just decompress the files mentioned below.

1. Preparing the files

Although it’s not vital, you should move all the files that may be in your USB drive to your hard drive. Leave the USB drive empty before starting.

Extract the TrueCrypt zip file and copy the following files to the root directory of your usb drive. For instance, S:\

* TrueCrypt Format.exe
* TrueCrypt.exe
* truecrypt.sys

2. Creating a volume

TrueCrypt includes a graphical utility to create protected volumes.

Start TrueCrypt Format.exe

Starting up

There is 2 kinds of volumes. For our purpose we will use the standard one. the specify the storage location.

Type in E:\tcFolder

E: is the letter where your USB drive is currently mounted and tcFolder is some arbitrary filename that does not already exist in the drive.

3. Select Encryption type

Select an encryption algorith. It doesn’t matter which one you pick, I for example used Blowfish encryption. However, Truecrypt offers a plethora of encryption options so select what you perfer.

4. Select the protected drive size

Enter the volume size of the disk you’re going to create. It’s generally best to leave some unprotected room in the drive for various purposes. The last step of the tutorial requires about free 600KB in the drive. I am using a 1Gb usb thumb drive so I will make a 950MB protected forlder in it.

If you have a 128MB USB drive, About 120MB will do. 256 -> 248 etc and so on, you get the idea.

5. Creating a suitable Password

Enter a good a resonably complex password and don’t forget it. Passwords of less then six charaters and dont contain any numbers or symbles are especially easy to crack using brute force methods such as an dictionary attack .

The program will then allocate the memory on your USB drive and you will see a file called tcFolder. Now we need to make that file accessible through a virtual volume that we will mount using the drivers that come with TrueCypt.

6. Mounting and unmounting the password protected space.

Since it would not ve convenient to perform several steps everytime you run want to access files from your thumbdrive, we need to create two very simple batch files that call instructions from TrueCrypt automatically to open and close your protected drive.

A. Create a file called “mount.bat” on the root directory of your USB drive.

Open it with notepad and type in the following:

@ Echo off
TrueCrypt /v tcFolder /l S /m rm /auto /q
explorer S:

The first line will create a virtual drive with letter S which will be your protected drive. You can choose another letter instead of S (it must not be assigned to another drive).
The second line is optional and it will just open an explorer window pointing to your protected drive everytime you mount it.

B. Create a file called “umount.bat” on the root directory of your USB drive (i.e. S:\umount.bat)

Open it with notepad and type in the following:

@ Echo off
TrueCrypt /d S /q

This will unmount the secure volume. Remember to change K here too if you did before.

C. Create a file called Autorun.inf on the root directory of your USB drive (i.e. S:\Autorun.inf)

Open it with notepad and type in the following:

[autorun]
open=mount.bat
icon=

If you want your USB drive to show a different icon on My PC, you can specify an icon name and put that icon file into the root directory of the drive.

This will make it so that every time you connect your drive to the computer, it will ask for the password immediately. Thus, making it faster and easier to access the protected drive. This step is optional if you dont want it to load automatically, on which case you would have to connect the device and then manually execute mount.bat.

7. Using the protected drive

After completing all the steps, just disconnect your drive from the computer and connect it again. It will prompt you for the password you selected before and then open the protected drive, where you can put back the files you had copied to your hard drive.

To make it clear, what we have done is create an encrypted FILE in the USB drive. That file stores your protected drive. To access the protected drive, we have to mount a second virtual drive that gives you a way of modifying the content of your protected drive.

If you have trouble setting this up, the most likely problems are:

* The letter that you’re using to mount your virtual drive (S in this example) is already taken by another drive in your computer. Change it.
* You do not have administrative rights in the computer. To mount the virtual drive, TrueCrypt needs administrator rights in the computer. It will generally tell you that you don’t have permissions to mount.
* You’re in an older version of Windows. Prior to Windows 2000 and Windows XP a driver was needed for Windows to properly identified USB thumb drives. The drive should be downloadable form the Thumbdrive manufactures website. This, of course, if it did NOT come with the device when it was purchased.